Title: White Narcissus
Author: Raymond Knister
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White Narcissus

by

Raymond Knister

1

Richard Milne was only two hours away from the city, and it seemed
to be still with him. He found incredibly foreign the road down which
he swung, as though with resolution. Its emptiness shortly became
impressive. He met no one, and it seemed to lead burrowing, dusty,
into the bleak wind, into the centre of lost wastes screened by
scattered and fretful trees. The trees sighed as though in
abandonment from struggling forests which, the man knew, would seem
to recede as he went forward. He felt lost in this too-familiar
country, and slackened his pace.

It was an immediate relief to get out of Lower Warping after ten
minutes tramping its empty and shrunken streets, and inquire for a
lodging-place. The old Hotel, known to his boyhood by no other
name--blue-grey clapboards, two storeys and gable windows breasting
the crossroads--was closed. Richard Milne saw that before he had gone
a hundred yards down the cindered path from the station. He went back
to learn from a meditative youth on a baggage truck whether there was
now any other hotel in the place.

"Nope!" The fellow's grin showed a gap in his teeth. He raised his
voice against an irruption of the departed, hooting train. "Tom
Hughes puts up the travellers sometimes. If you're travellin' with
some line he buys, you might try there. He lives above the store. Was
you going to stay long?"

Prohibition, it appeared, had caused the place to close, at which
Milne was inclined to wonder, since it had afforded hospitality to
his last visit, scarcely a year ago. In any event, the remainder of
the hamlet was so torpid that on the spur of the moment he determined
to get out of it at once, and without seeking a welcome from any of
these people who, it came to him, must exist, for the flowers beside
their coloured verandas twitched peevish, proud heads in the wind,
while the wire gates before their lawns were primly closed. And if he
succeeded in finding them, would anyone remember him? No, he would
walk out to the farm. For some reason he did not leave his bag, but
carried it in his hand.

This matter was only one in the series of actions and adjustments
which were a part of his determination, of his plans, and of the trip
from the city. He had passed through it all with the impulsive
consciousness of nothing but the goal. He must see Ada Lethen, though
it were for the last time. Now, alone on the windy road, he began to
hesitate, to wonder. The fields, river banks, the astounding,
overwhelming sky he seemed to have forgotten, questioned him as an
alien. What was he doing there? And what good, he further asked
himself, would his coming do? He had returned often enough before. He
was moved to ward off despair by reminding himself that he could
<is(o nothing else. He had been compelled to come back. But ifi
memory could prove so fugacious, how had he trusted it so long?
Uncertainty came into his mind. But lifting his head he went
forward.

Like the village which had seemed still smaller than a village,
smaller than it had ever been before, this countryside had the look
of having arisen about Mm foreignly with the incredible immediacy of
a dream. The road made fitful efforts at directness, and would ignore
the swing of the high river banks, only a little farther on to skirt
a depression, a sunken, rich flat, bearing rank, blue-green oats
surrounded by drooping willows, elms through which only a glimpse of
the brown ripples of water could be seen; again, underbrush, small
maples, wild apples, green sumach came right to the road and hung
over the fence, hiding the drop of a ravine. A place of choked
vistas.

The road was easy walking for the greater part, with firm gravel
at first, and then, after a mile, occasional sandy spots, rutted,
with hoof-beaten soil between the wheel marks. Richard Milne had
buried his bare toes in this sand as a schoolboy. Recalling himself
with a smile, he reflected that he was no longer much of a
countryman, since he was allowing mere impressions of the place to
take his mind, his eye, from its utilitarian aspect. He could not
have told yet "how the crops looked," compared with the country he
had seen from the train. And doubtless he would be asked by the first
acquaintance he met to deliver an opinion.

Passably flourishing, he surmised, almost having forgotten how far
these harvests, so assiduously watched over by men, should have
progressed in maturity at the end of June.

The corn, he recalled, should be knee-high by the twelfth of July,
and was far from that now. The wheat was in head, though still green,
short and spindly, waving on almost discernible soil of
light-coloured knolls. Oats were dark in the rich hollows, fading to
a brighter green on the slopes. The clover heads were red, clustered;
ah, there was something on which he could compliment an old-time
friend. Perhaps the other things would come on better later.

He wasn't sure that he cared, he admitted, after these years. He
had borne his share of such preoccupations, which seemed designed to
pen his youthful hopes forever within this congeries of haphazard
misshapen fields. Yet it all came back to him, fields and years, more
poignant at every yard he traversed, and he knew that he could never
be freed from the hold of this soil, however far from it he had
travelled, though he were never to be called back by itself, but by a
forfeit of love which in final desperation he had come to redeem or
tear from its roots forever.

Again he found that he had hastened; then sauntering on with an
appearance of ease, the memories stirred within him so that he should
not have wished to meet an old neighbour on the road. Nothing could
be farther from his wishes than a revealing sign of these conflicting
emotions. At best it would be inadequate. And the presence of another
would make any such display ridiculous, he reflected, thinking of the
rebellious period in which he nearly had hated the place and its
inhabitants. He glanced at the house he was passing.

Until now buildings had been part of the village in his mind and,
indeed, there had been no rural mail box at the roadside before this
one. Lilac bushes stood at either side of the gate; a path curved
from townward between the gate and across the lawn, long grass of an
evenness which showed that occasionally it was mown. The lumbering
farmhouse seemed to stand on the edge of a brink, for nothing showed
behind it but, in the distance, the round tops of apple trees,
grey-green in the almost apparent wind. At the first glance he felt
that the barn and other buildings might have dropped away, but
turning he saw the unpainted, sagging-ridged building standing on the
edge of the hollow, as near the road where he had unwittingly passed
it, as the house. It had been moved up from the slope behind in his
absence.

He knew this place very well, but not these improvements. It was
the farm his uncle had owned, where he had lived as a boy. As he
passed he looked at the mail box. William A. Burnstile was the name.
... How? Raffish, turbulent Bill Burn-stile, big boy of the country
school, up to whom little Dick Milne had looked with the hero-worship
only bad boys can evoke--chronically unstable on growing up, until
his departure for "the West"--was Bill Burnstile the firmly
established, evidently prudent or lucky farmer of this place?

While Richard Milne meditated, wondering whether he could not
satisfy his curiosity as well as his need by putting up here for the
night, he was decided by a series of shouts, wails, and pursuing
cries. A boy of eleven with yellow hair on a thin neck rushed around
the corner of the house, followed by a series younger, and turned at
bay against their tumbling charge. Obviously this was no place for
his sojourning; still, fascinated, he stayed and watched the
children. The first, with exultant yips, trotted in a circle, and
held high above his head a kitten, which clawed wistfully for a
footing on the air. Two smaller boys, with shouts, jumped to reach
it, seized the other by the legs and downed him torhis own
deprecating yells of "No fair, le' me "lone." While they wrestled and
squirmed in the grass, a little girl approached, and stepping
gingerly among legs, managed to get hold of the kitten. She was
running toward the man, to hide behind the snowball bushes at the
side of the lawn, when an older girl appeared, calling out to the
others. At that instant both girls caught sight of the stranger, and
a hush came over the whole serried group of children, puffing yet
with their struggle.

For an instant Richard Milne did not know whether or not to pass
on. Of course, he would not stay here by deliberate choice, even if
he could be accommodated. Still, there was his curiosity. "Boys!" he
called. "Is this where Mr Burnstile lives?"

They nudged each other to go and see what the man wanted. Finally,
the second boy, the doughty wrestler, left the others and came over
to the fence, turning his head in the wind as though to listen, his
yellow hair ruffling. "Can't hear. Wind's wrong way."

"Is this where Mr Burnstile lives? I mean, ah, Bill
Burnstile?"

"Why, that's me! Oh, you mean my dad. Yes, he lives here. He's
cutting hay. Will any of us do?"

The man smiled. "Yes. Your father was out West for a time, wasn't
he? Well, you tell him that Dick Milne was here. Just see if he
remembers."

"Ouch! That's poison ivy." The boy had been leaning too close to
the fence. "What? Oh, all right. I'll tell him." With a last look of
wonder at the clothes of the stranger he was gone, skipping into the
midst of the other children, who in the meantime had approached
nearer--like steam melting into a cloud. The girl with the forgotten
cat dangling looked after him.

They were so like a little group of perturbed animals, crying out
half-audibly there in the wind, that Richard Milne laughed as he went
on. The sight of the country children strangely refreshed him, and no
longer was the place alien, but lonesome, waiting to welcome the
footsteps of any returning wanderer. He smiled. This life was all as
it had been, though these boys and girls would lack the excitement of
his own childhood in recognizing "an old tramp."

Evening was coming on, and even the apparently endless stationary
evening of June waned after the supper hour. That consideration at
least should urge him forward. Again he wondered; it seemed strange
that no one he knew appeared in these familiar spaces. There was, of
course, the one unchanging farm, where all his hopes were centred,
his ultimate destination, and where he could expect no welcome. But
surely before reaching it he would find people less interested in
himself. He would have no trouble about a place for the night, and
somewhere, if needed, there would be a boarding place for longer. He
had money, after all, and that was usually unfailing in incidental
uses. Still, the club bag was becoming notably heavy.

The land became more rolling, hummocky, confused, with bare
cultivated spots, thick brush along random, half-concealed fences.
The road and the river seemed to rival each other in the vagrancy of
their courses. The banks were now white clay, now green with weedy
grass or up-grown shrubbery, a brief row of tall trees--over all of
which the sun flowed coldly. A man was tiny enough in the midst of
great cities, he remembered strangely, but here it was possible to
wonder how many more of these roads there were stretching away into
the evening, endlessly, bearing each its strung-out farms, its weight
of enigmatic human and animal circumstance.

He seemed suddenly to have walked a great distance. A burden of
his own past seemed to have descended upon him. How beautiful all
this had been, and as the years of his boyhood slipped past without
more than a dream of wider freedom, how dreary! The changing of the
seasons had only emphasized the impression of monotony, and he had
been held by inertia, and uncertain hope of fulfilment, on the only
soil he knew. He had begun to write, and it was comparatively late
that he had obeyed that questing spirit which is the heritage of
youth. Well, he had gone into the world and done all that he had
dreamed of doing, and he had returned frequently enough with the one
purpose, to the one being which could call him back; and still the
land was the same, with a sorrowful sameness. It seemed that the
beauty of this country should have increased, become clear and
undeniable even to its preoccupied inhabitants. It always seemed that
these people should have found larger interest and a wider view
during his own period of Wanderjahre and Lehrjahre.

But now he was coming to the Hymerson farm. Here he knew he would
be safe, more or less at home. Old friends of his family in a large
phrase, old neighbours at least, they would be glad to see him, if
only from curiosity. There did not seem to be improvements in the
place, he noted, nor neglect. Wire fencing extending part way along
the road, then the old rankly growing hedge, until that was clipped
low in front of the house. This was a great affair of cheap yellow
brick, which had been a showplace in his boyhood. It already showed
signs of decay. The roof, of wooden shingles, was brown, the wood of
the gables stained brown with weather, and the originally white
veranda posts and scrollings were flaked grey and lead-coloured.
There were high weeds along the roadside, and the lawn itself was
lush with grass, except for spots uprooted in irregular holes. The
source of these holes became apparent in squeals from behind the
house. The chorus, kept up so pertinaciously, foretold the supper
hour of the pigs.

Entering in at the open lane, for there was no gate to the lawn,
Richard Milne saw again the familiar buildings. The barn, an L-shaped
huge structure of splotched grey beneath an old coat of pink paint,
had been raised upon a foundation of cement blocks, abutted by
lengthy graded approaches, which occupied much of the space of the
yard.

The yard was a broad expanse strewn with apparent indiscrimination
: smaller buildings and used machinery. A long, slatted corncrib with
sway-back roof looked as though, empty, it could have been drawn away
by a team of horses. But yellow ears of corn protruded between the
slats at one end, a remainder after the winter's feeding. A similarly
disreputable granary stood at the other side. And all about sprawled
cultivators, harrows, discs, a mower, a bare wagon, the rack of which
leaned against the side of the corncrib.

These machines were not rusted in any state of disuse. In fact,
they and the buildings, instead of giving the place a general effect
of neglect, imparted a business-like aspect, as of work being in
progress which forbade such fol-de-rols as neatness, newness, paint,
and shelter from the elements of air and earth, for which all things
were, in any case, ultimately destined.

Before Richard Milne came to the house he saw crossing the yard in
the rear a flapping, overalled, small figure of a man, carrying a
pair of dripping swill pails. He waved, going forward without setting
down his club bag. It was Carson Hymerson, who went on to the swill
barrels and dipped the pails, heaving them out with a swish of water
whitened by the admixture of chopped grain, and vegetable refuse
curling over the rims.

"Just time supper, have good trip out? Hogs here they know it's
time for supper. 'Spose you're glad to get away to the country once
'nawhile, how long you goin' to stay?" Hymerson said all this
apparently without breath, and with the automatic and evenly timed
swiftness of a phonographic record turned at twice its normal speed.
It was just his way, Richard remembered people said, as he shook
hands with him. The farmer was over fifty, but still his ruddy, hard
face, tinged to brass colour by tan, was unchanged by wrinkles,
knobby as ever as to chin, nose, cheekbones, and saltily blue of eye.
"Well, Missus'11 want to see you better go in supper, I'll be there
right now."

Milne hesitated, still holding his bag, but the tone had, been so
arbitrary that, considering that the man might have some other
immediate task before the meal, he turned back toward the house,
walking over a series of long, warped boards under the edges of which
grass grew. The surface of the yard was sparsely green in places,
where vegetation had survived the trampling of mud in the spring.

The screen door under the porch was open, a wood-burning range
hummed cheerily, and there were steps from another room. "Shoo! Scat
out of here!" A black cat sped before her, but Mrs Hymerson, compared
with her husband, was ceremonial in her reception. She wore a white
shirtwaist with high collar, and a black pleated skirt.

"Why, how do you do; you're quite a stranger, Richard. But I
suppose I should call you Mr Milne. I thought, you know, I heard
Carson talking to somebody, but I couldn't just be sure. You must
stay for tea. How's--" She seemed to recall that he lived apart from
relatives, that he had no near ones. "How's everything in the city?
It must be hot there! Well! It's nice to have you come back and see
us." She nodded.

Richard Milne, in the polite replies permitted him at intervals,
was conscious of a subdued reservation, like excitement coming
unreasonably into his mind. It was impatience, he discovered. He
wanted to cloak it in random conversation, discussion of country
doings, anything. He could have tried to arrange some provision for a
long stay, but he knew that Mrs Hymerson would be offended if he
immediately proposed a definite arrangement. And then his uncertainty
recalled that he did not know himself how long or in what manner he
would be staying.

2

He had washed the grime from hands and face in the kitchen, wiped
on a prickly towel, and was sitting at the supper table where Mrs
Hymerson, who insisted that they should not wait, was pouring tea,
before the farmer came in, breathing audibly. Calves from a
neighbouring farm had broken through the line fence; he had seen them
afar off browsing on his oats, and chased them.

"Well, we'll go and call on him after supper, you and I," he
announced to Milne.

"Are they from the Lethen side?" asked the latter.

"Certainly they're from Lethen's. That old man's past farming, if
he ever was any good at it. Can't even keep up his fences. Why he
ever stays on-- But then you must remember. Bet he'd seem as old when
you were a kid as he does now."

"I remember how impressive he appeared, with his young brown face
and his white hair. I hadn't seen anyone like him; and when I got to
know him a little better he never quite became commonplace."

"Quite a character." Mrs Hymerson smiled, as though she knew and
wished to take the flavour from what her husband was about to
express. "And you know, he knows more than you'd think, too. They say
he was well educated when he was young--"

"Appear distinguished, I guess he does, appear," burst in the
rapid accents of Carson Hymerson. "That's all he does, is appear, the
old fraud, don't I know him, know him like a book! I guess I ought
to, hmph!" The man drew up his right shoulder and twisted his head
aside in a grimace of cynic humour. "Why, when I and he was on the
school board, there never was any peace, but he'd be thinking up
ideas. And you couldn't do anything with him, once he got an idea in
his head. Crazy, that's what he is, crazy, and he don't know
it." The last few swift words came in a lower tone, for he was not
unaware of Richard Milne's reception of them, a hardening of the
mouth.

"I am sorry to hear that. Mr Lethen must have changed. It seemed
to me that he was the kind of man who, if he could make out to live
in the country at all, would be of invaluable service." The younger
man spoke with a deliberation which spoke of long-weighed
conclusions, and a disposition to regard only politeness in listening
to whatever might be said on the subject. Carson Hymerson heard him
with impatient snorts, scarcely able to keep from interrupting but,
perhaps because of the still regard of his wife, less acrid in tone
when he did rattle:

"You might think so. It's quite a while since you had much to do
with old Lethen, ain't it? Well! You ask the neighbours when you want
to find out about a man! You can ask . .." He mumbled, then went on
with greater heat. "Invaluable use, why that's just what he ain't, is
useful."

"Yes, of course, it must be kind of past his time for working very
hard." Mrs Hymerson, Richard Milne's amusement noted, had preserved a
sense for affable adjustment which her husband might never have
possessed. The latter was not going to let her smooth things
over.

"Why, look at the way he's always lived with that woman of his.
That's enough for me, never speaking! And take his daughter--"

"Yes . . .?" began Richard, so quickly that the woman at once
struck in, high-pitched.

"All I say is ... all I say is, we can't ever know, don't
you see, what may be at the bottom of these things. Everyone has
their cross to bear, and we can't always understand, so it behoves us
not to judge others." Mrs Hymerson's voice became more even as she
went on, despite the snort of Carson, as though she were reciting a
well remembered scriptural lesson. Milne, too grateful now that a
moment of rage had passed not to abet her irrelevance, turned to
her.

"Is Arvin not at home now, Mrs Hymerson? I hope you'll pardon my
not inquiring before; I missed him at once, of course."

"Arvin, he went out in the country today to look for a cow. Kind
of running out of good cows, some going dry, going to fat a couple
for beef. So I thought I'd give the boy a chance, let him use his own
head this time and buy one without me near. I hope he don't get
beat," he added grimly.

Richard Milne could not forbear a smile, which only belatedly he
reflected might be taken as derogatory to the young man, twenty-six
at the time of his last visit, but schooled-- better, dragooned--by
his father's impatience daily."

"That's fine." The remark hearty and sincere. "I don't think
they'll get ahead of Arvin in a deal."

Three had been published, Richard told her. "Things are going well
enough that I'm taking a holiday." He chuckled. "Keeping in the
office, where most of my work with the advertising agency is done,
gets pretty tiresome, especially at this season of the year."

"Get you fellows out in the hayfield," was Hymerson's jocular
amenity. "Find out it was hot enough there, too."

The young man did not reply to this, reflecting almost with dismay
that he had forgotten the terms of intercourse in the country, by
which it was necessary that he should be able to "give as good as was
sent." Doing that, in fact, was one of the chief roads to
respect--one certainly blocked to him, even if the restraint caused
him to appear morose.

"Our work," he proceeded, "is interesting; so we are told by
people who don't know it. And certainly it has a fascination. It's
fun to know that you are writing for a million readers, from the
start." This was a rough effort at approximation to which he felt
that a response could be sought. Nothing tried him more than talking
of his good work, his creative books, to curious or indifferent
people, and he valued the topic of advertising in proportion to the
lack of immediacy it had for him. From the time of his rural
upbringing he retained a sense that no one but other craftsmen really
could be concerned in such matters.

He listened idly to the exclamations of his hostess and the
dubious questions of Carson Hymerson really in swelling restiveness.
He fancied that the shadow of the crosspiece of the screen door crept
across the kitchen floor with a surreptitious spurt. The evening
would be upon him.

The meal was finished, and he had relished the potatoes fried in
butter, the cold boiled pork, home-made bread, and rhubarb sauce.
Carson Hymerson was in no haste now to rise, but drank a third cup of
tea. At a remark upon the return of Bill Burnstile with a family, he
sucked his lips and said complacently :

"Yes, rolling stone, Bill. Expect he'll be pulling out of
here, even, one of these times, eh? Yes, he did collect a
family, all right. Guess his woman's a pretty fair woman to help get
along too, or he wouldn't be able to make a payment on a place like
he has." He made the pronouncement with an unwavering, as it were a
significant gaze of the little blue eyes in the direction of his
wife, and Richard Milne turned to her. He would have to look up Bill
while he was here.

"All the old neighbours," she assented, while Carson rapidly
demanded how long he intended to stay. "Most of them are here yet.
Not many have moved away."

"A few days, perhaps longer," Richard said, with an assumption of
certainty surprising to himself, adding, "I think I'll take a stroll
down the road this evening."

Carson seemed to be replying to his wife. "Good riddance if some
would get out, let their land be farmed right." A thought seemed to
strike him. "You wouldn't be going to Lethen's tonight, would
you?"

"Yes," agreed Richard Milne candidly. "I'll probably call there."
He paid no more attention to the anxious, almost signalling look of
the woman than Carson Hymerson himself did. The latter seemed to
regard him with stupefaction, which merged into an awkward grin of
mocking badinage.

"Oh, I see! There's attraction over there, come to think of it.
Not that I blame you. Now that I remember, you did use to kind of
shine around Ada when you was a young gaffer. That's all right!"

They had risen from the table by this time, and a slow-mounting
annoyance approaching anger had modified Richard Milne's haste to get
away. "That's pleasant," he asserted. He secured his hat and went
outside, to the accompaniment of the housewife's expressed wish that
he remember her to Mrs Lethen; but Carson was still beside him, hands
comfortably stuck in deep overall pockets.

"Kind of looks as though I wasn't going to have you help me see to
them calves after all, eh? Unless you go that way through the fields
with me. Maybe I'll see you over there, anyway. Ha! Ha! But, of
course, you wouldn't be coming away with me yet so early. Well, I'll
see the door's left unlocked for you."

Milne thanked him with a grave smile, as one willing to accept all
this as well intentioned jocosity, and hurried down the lane to the
road. His chief feeling was one of haste.

"Well, don't go 'way mad, looks like it was going to freeze, don't
it," was the parting sally, which his mind repeated to his hurried
steps down the dry road.

3

The wind was dying before the sunset, but had chilled, turning up
the under sides of leaves. Trees shivered under a dulled sky. The
evening, muted by wind and cold, given a sullen swiftness of
animation, mated the feeling of Richard Milne. After a week of torrid
weather in which the very sky seemed to melt, rain should have come
to sweeten the smell of ripening grain and whitened clods. But first
this dry cold, in which trees writhed blanching, while now and again
a cricket chirping up fitfully made still greater the removal from
the sultry quietude proper to the time and season.

Once more the man was overcome by a sense of strangeness. He had
been in his office that morning, had walked and taxied in the streets
of the city and left it at noon, riding through unforgettable miles
of railway yards and factories and grimy suburbs. And already he
could make himself believe in the existence of such things only with
an effort. For all the years in which he had struggled for success
there, it seemed that the only real and personal part of his life had
been lived here, surrounded by trees, fields, river, which claimed
him as though he had never left them. He did not need to look at this
house or hedge or vista for a landmark, because he could have
believed that he had walked down this road every night for the past
year. And accompanying the return upon him bodily of the old life was
the same sense of futility and uncertainty which he had known in
those times--the cause of his eventual determination to leave, and
also of his periodic returns. And with every step he was approaching
nearer the source of that uncertainty.

The Lethen place hid the sunset, looming beyond a dredged cut to
the river, like a moat, dry and overgrown with weeds. The tangle of
vegetation, which in this light seemed to overlay the buildings, was
in itself a quickening token to Richard Milne's remembrance, and he
slowed, paused. Great evergreens shadowed the front of the place and
guided his footsteps toward the lane. Dust flurried about him
impotently as he reached the little leaning gate and went across the
front yard, itself no haven to him: a wild expanse of grass and pine
needles shadowy and whispering to his rising excitement of
insuperable awaiting barriers.

The house was old, its narrow windows peered dark from drapery of
Virginia creeper, only the gables showing the weathered brick expanse
which towered remote as though to scan the oblivious invader below.
There was something secret but secure about the air of the house,
like an awareness of its life indecipherable in dark hiding of the
vines. So much of its appearance Richard Milne knew more from an act
of memory than by bodily sight. He had reached the low weathered
wooden gate giving on the lawn, and he became unconscious of
everything for that moment, of the mysteriously quickened night, the
house, the trees, the dark, the pressing sky. For he knew that Ada
Lethen was on the veranda before him, a few steps before his
feet.

Her white dress stirred against the dusk, and he was filled and
enveloped, overwhelmed with sense of her. He surprised a look of
gladness and incredulity on her pale face as she slowly rose to greet
him. And as of old her nervous pale fingers fluttered to her
hair.

"Richard Milne! Why are you here? When-did you come?"

He held her hand, looking into her darkened eyes, almost level
with his own. "You are asking!" he exclaimed slowly. "Do you know, I
couldn't quite believe--well, in you." Suddenly he realized it. "Ever
since I got off the train I've been hurried, urged by something.
Something was wrong--at least; and I had to see you to believe that
this sorry, this decorative and rapscallion world did hold you--all
that you mean." In a boyish access he laughed.

She laughed a little, with an intonation of sadness, withdrawing
her hand. "Sit down. You've not changed. When did you come?" She
moved two books on the seat, and reposed beyond them.

He sighed, still lost in the sight of her. "Then you don't refuse
to see me, you don't send me away this time ... or not yet." His tone
was reproachfully accusing, more than ironical. She smiled faintly.
Her pale, almost sallow face had become radiant.

"Why shouldn't I be ... simply enchanted, to see an old friend?"
She spoke softly. "Not every evening. . . . It's a long time...."

His mind refused to hope, to consider implications, overpowering,
impossible, and rapt. He was not annoyed by the word "friend." It was
enough to be here. Without touching them he indicated the books.

"You still read a great deal." His tone strove to flit to a
lightness belying his pity, the feeling in his familiar recognition
which had brought the tears to his eyes when he met her. "Still," he
had said. And "not every evening" did he come.

He had long since, for all his freedom in thought, his assent to
her ideals, looked with uneasiness upon her unremitting, her almost
possessed reading. That feeling was beyond his rationalizing. He had
been able to object only interferingly, as he felt powerless. What
were books to her? Anodyne, perhaps, and they had to be of increasing
potency. She paid little heed to him. What was she to do? She had
been too wise to put it so, knowing what his answer would be. He felt
absurd to cavil, though he did not like some of the things she read.
. . . In his remark was contained a whole cycle of reminiscence, of
familiarity which now seemed impossible.

"Yes, the books." She spoke in tones which to his cherished vision
of her were what finality is to despair. "I read a great deal
still--still."

Her present listlessness did not relieve him, but incongruously
made him more anxious for her. He tried to speak as casually as a
stranger.

"I remember them, your wide and esoteric explorations! Am I to
take it that you are wearying of wandering? Or are you only
temporarily abashed by the illimitable wastes, you're waiting to
start forth again, afresh--you see the minarets of your city, lost in
vapour, and you pause; and its riddle, while you rest, calls again.
Its riddle. . . ." As he went on, the words seemed to flow
automatically, as though he were drunk with a surprise of
enchantment, while he watched her happy and tired face.

"The riddle," she murmured. They were silent a little. "That alone
used to serve as reward, but it is long since the penance."

"I am not a riddle, but a man," he reminded her. "Come, are you so
quiet because you think I am a ghost? You want proof!" But he did not
touch her. "I should inquire about your parents, the circumstances of
our life which nobody else knows."

He had spoken as though determinedly gay, cheering one sick; and
now there was purpose in the indirect reference to her family, as of
a relic of embitterment.

Ada Lethen laughed. "Do I seem so quiet? I assure you it's not
because I don't appreciate, in all the word means, that you are here.
Only the other day Mother was speaking to me of you."

"Was she?"

His eagerness was based, again, upon imagined changes during his
absence. But it was no time yet to stake anything on the possible
discovery of what had taken place in that house. "I hope Mrs Lethen
has been in good health lately?"

"Not exactly. She never is, of course, that would be too much to
expect. Lately at times she seems better, and then a day or a week
will come when she alarms me." Though the voice was soft, her
articulation was definite and precise, her manner quietly
explanatory, so that Richard Milne at moments fancied he was in a
dream, not there, that far away she, like himself, sat alone.

He saw the real image of her as she sat alone, while seasons
passed. How else should she sit, though her reason for being in that
house always had been to keep from loneliness the father and mother
whose estrangement had been one of the legends of his childhood? In
itself that was enough to make for loneliness, and he marvelled at
her endurance, her poised good sense. With the coming of womanhood,
should she not feel free? But she could not believe in freedom.

She was talking softly, with the same certainty in which she had
always shaken her head at his reasonings, his pleadings, implying
that he understood her situation better than he pretended.

And in reality that was the case. He understood, but he felt
surely that if the pair had been left to themselves long ago, they
probably long ago should have become reconciled. Yet what seemed
reasonable and practicable in the daylit world of the material and of
work, ebbed away from him here before the power of a reality
long-accepted, which denied the existence of all else. And peering
into the past to that child, strange-eyed, fearfully watchful,
wounded, which Ada Lethen must have been, he felt that her presence
might have been a sword between the two, so that they could never
forget the bitterness of the first few days after the quarrel. That
bitterness, dying away to inanition, died to a complete disregard so
deep that they did not care to separate, even would not have done so,
perhaps, had the girl not been there.

Ada Lethen was silent now, looking across the fields, and Richard
Milne could not believe that she had spoken. Those fields, he
remembered, while they became dreary and inanimate to him at memory
of the many times he had returned to them in vain, these fields
barrenly flourishing to the darkening oblivious forests, were her
constant sight. He seized her still hand --he who had vowed never to
touch her again until the availing outcome of his quest had appeared.
He had seen it all many an evening before, and she--she had looked on
few other vistas throughout her years. "What is it holds you, Ada?"
he asked in a choking tone, as though she were dying before his
eyes.

She did not stir, there was no motion of her body on the bench
while her hand warmed in his, and she looked into the approaching
night. With a long sigh, a smile, she turned, looked at her hands on
the books, at him. At last, quietly:

"I don't know." She roused herself and smiled almost brightly at
him. "Why are you here?" she asked, as though the question were as
reasonable as his had been.

He made no answer, since they both knew that it was not necessary
to mention why he had returned this time. Something made him
understand that she had not changed, that surely in all this place of
eroded dreams she was least changeable. And yet he knew as well that
his spirits were rising as if in obedience to an old call, and he was
about to press her with reasonings, expostulations she had heard
often enough before, and which would pour from his lips in a flood.
But she turned her eyes away and went on.

"I don't know, and I have admitted to you that there is no reason
which would operate logically. But perhaps what holds me here is
knowing that if I went my mother would die. She would starve, as
completely--God knows it is precious little that I do or can do for
her, and yet it is only my being here that keeps her soul alive. They
have been estranged so long that they are really dead to each other,
and yet if they were left alone together they would both, she, at
least, would die the bodily death as well."

He smiled bitterly. "It is always of her you speak," he added,
with a surprising acrimony, for his thwarted feeling was being
transferred to annoyance in behalf of the representative of his own
sex in this generation-long quarrel. "Doesn't your father feel? Do
you think he doesn't know the bitter of loneliness and misprision as
well as your mother?"

"Father, of course. I know that, and it is why things are as they
are. Possibly if I could take sides, there could be some outcome,
even to strife. But I see, I understand too well, so that there is no
hope. I see the sadness of both, and how oblivion awaits it all...
across a mist of pathos like dreaming."

"You're too sympathetic," said the man gruffly. He wanted to add
that she had been thinking about it too much. "Surely something could
be done. I tell you, it would be a tonic, a rough cold-blooded
treatment. Why, they could have been laughed out of everything, or
I'm mistaken. To go on in this way--it's absurd. . . ." But he spoke
less from reason than desperation, with a maddeningly increasing
sense of impotence in the smothering shroud of time and place, the
overpowering creep of memories that die only to haunt implacably.
"It's plain to me that your father has a good deal to complain of.
Perhaps you don't know that there are many kinds of men with whom
no--no such situation could exist."

"I hope so," she murmured, so that he could scarcely hear. The
silence grew, big with all that they could not say, which neither
could understand well enough to form into words, and yet which they
felt between them like an impalpable tie.

"There are women who wouldn't let it exist," he continued, with a
doggedness which ignored his paradox. But Ada did not smile.

"Well," sighed Richard Milne at last. "We don't seem to know that
we have been apart for a long time."

They smiled, lost in a sense of this, of being together, and that
each dearly lost moment gave its measure of almost painful bliss.
Looking at the clear profile of Ada Lethen, he felt his heart rise,
as though it would break his body apart. The mazed night could have
lasted forever, it might have been the beginning or end of
eternity.

They exchanged little words, about his travels, how the village
seemed to him, changes . . . almost as though shy. And a wave of
tender memory came over Richard Milne at her questions, her concern.
He saw those days mysterious and full of homely poetry, when he had
been a boy in these fields--an evocation of weather, irrelevant
transitory conditions, neighbours, above all the surveillance of
these over the Lethen family, which had drawn to it his child's
curiosity. The odd and vivid little girl of whom he was conscious
sitting at one side and behind him in the schoolhouse; their
awakening to each other which seemed without beginning; the silence
between them, always the silence, and the forbidding looks which he
read in the constraint of either of her parents he inadvertently met.
The secret coming out at last from the mouth of gossip that wondered
at his not always having known. All these made a medium through which
translucently to see Ada Lethen--an image of sleet frozen upon maple
buds.

"You do not love them/' he continued slowly, half unwilling to
voice his thought. "But that does not cause you to change your
attitude toward me. You're no kinder or more-- reasonable. I dare say
if you hated them you'd think that gave you the right, or the
obligation to care for their needs." The cruelty of his suffering was
speaking now.

"Hate? I can never hate them--it would be impossible." Yet she had
answered so swiftly, with an involuntary look at him, that he felt he
had probed her most secret dread. "Only pity. It is pity which-- Pity
will kill me!" she exclaimed with sudden wildness, as though the
words themselves lent to her sense a foretaste of ultimate
bitterness.

"I can't! I can't!"

She was sobbing words against his shoulder, while all his
thoughts, the froth on the billow of his emotion flew scattered by
this sudden contact. And he had come determined not to touch her
hand, for the havoc it would be to him afterward. Now he held her,
tightly, speaking incoherently.

"Precious Ada! This is going to kill you. Ada! Let us go away. You
must' We can live a different life from this. We'll go--"

All the time her tears were changing something in his mind. The
hot tears fell on his hands, and he began to try to
comfort her. It was as though they were children again, and she had
cried, as she did once, about something some of the other children
said, and he had offered her his handkerchief. The years were broken
up and their emotions returned upon him in a confused avalanche,
while he held her, and at the same time he was in the present, his
arms were holding her as they had longed to do.

"Let us go away!" he heard himself repeating in a tone of
anguished pleading which was almost maudlin.

The night was flowing past them, through the trees, past them in
the cold vines of the veranda of the decayed house. And it seemed as
though they were being left, stranded in an unimaginable waste beyond
life, alone and not together, deserted even of hot and frenzied
words, while the mystery of the earth and the skies became in
imminence torturingly sweet.

4

At this moment something made Richard Milne aware of a stirring in
the room behind them. There was still light enough to show the figure
of a woman, that woman who was sinister in his mind by very reason of
her appalling and helpless misery. Her tall form bent over a vase of
white narcissi. Other vases of the glowing white flower lent a
distilled radiance to the dusk of the room. It seemed, though the
window was down, that a sickly, heavy odour came spreading impalpable
through the air. Richard seemed to be stupefied by it, and kept his
watch in fascination; but the woman inside appeared unconscious of
everything but the flowering bulbs. Her fingers caressed a blossom,
and she passed to the other side of the room to look at a bulb just
breaking into bud, with a slow, trembling shake of the head. She
gazed, a long time at this one, and long at one wilting with the
accomplishment of its short life. She turned at last and passed into
another room, opening and closing the door in silence peculiarly a
summation of her white face.

He felt and heard a sigh at his cheek. "She can't have heard us. .
. ." The window was darkened by the Virginia creeper.

"You speak as though nothing could be more terrible than her
hearing us," he replied aloud. "As a matter of fact, it would
probably be one of the best things which could happen if they
overheard us--both of them--discussing them in the harshest and least
sympathetic manner." His own surprised misgiving at the urgency of
these words was only equalled by hers. She was struck silent in a way
which made patent the effort with which she began speaking again.

"She has always loved the narcissi." Ada's cadence on that word
"loved" was enough to show that her fear was well grounded, and that
pity could drain her soul. Instead of seeing an unreal, almost
delusive quality in the situation, as one fresh from the sane world,
she appeared to conceive of no other reality beyond this abnormal
state of affairs. She accepted wholeheartedly the fact of her mother
and her mother's state, where one unobsessed would have implied, for
all its gravity, a lightness of reservation.

"I remember," he assented heavily, with an accumulation of
unspoken criticism in his tone. "But how does she endure them? A bulb
or two is nice to have, if you like them, but such a number, with
their enervating odour, must be intolerable to anyone else."

"But she likes them, worships them. She seems to think of nothing
else from day to night. She looks at them, cares for them, she has
some of them beside her when she sleeps, and first thing in the
morning she comes downstairs to look at the others. I have known her
to get up in the middle of the night to come downstairs to the
sitting-room and look at them. Sometimes she will fall in a reverie
over them, and I can scarcely call her away to a meal."

"Yes, she must be fairly fond of them," he assented grimly. "But
how do you stand it? It must get on your nerves, doesn't it, day
after day?" He was consciously trying to arouse her. "To say nothing
of the smell. And she keeps the windows closed all the time?"

"Yes, nearly all the time. . . . Sometimes I plead with her, but I
think it does no good, it does harm. She becomes secretive, and
starts when I come into the room and she is with them."

Richard was almost ready to feign such brutality as casual
curiosity would dictate. "It's pathological," he muttered. "Should be
looked into."

"They've always been so much to her, a refuge for her yearning,
since I seem inanimate and averse. And--more now-- And then--" He
could see that she was struggling with the obviousness of some
feeling which was obscurely trying to make her refer to her
father.

Richard Milne smiled bitterly at the conception of her as
inanimate and averse, but he said :

"And your father still means more to her than she admits or knows,
though she would cut her heart out to be rid of him--" There was a
weary flippancy almost of cynicism in his utterance, as of one arming
himself with brusqueness against too many torturing perplexities. And
again there was an upward inflection here suddenly warily deceitful,
though he would not openly question her; for while he knew the
outward circumstances of this quandary, never yet had he known Ada
Lethen to talk about it in the way he wished, as though she expected
or even hoped that he could understand.

"That is to be expected," she answered, with a tinge of coldness,
"seeing the source of it all. Had it been any ordinary quarrel which
tempted them into declaring in the frenzied tones I remember, that
they would never speak to each other again-- the bitterness might
have, it must have, lapsed, passed away in the lukewarm tolerance
with which most people must regard each other."

It came to him that she was a stranger to the warmth and coolness
of ordinary domestic relations and family intercourse. An uncanny
thrill was imparted with her words, as if they had embodied an
exercise of intuition on the part of an immigrant from another
planet, but hardly inured to the life of this; and he could have wept
to think of that little girl.

"You--you were present at the quarrel, the original one?" He dared
not ask, and yet he must.

Yes, she told him. The child had sat at the head of the stairs,
shivering in her nightgown, and she heard it all. The raised voices
went on for hours, and, as in the height of a storm, it always semed
that violence could reach no further pitch and these emotions would
come to outrageous ends. "I'll never forget how I shivered, and my
heart went when I thought they meant to kill one another. But at last
I fell asleep there." She went on with added constraint in her tone,
"And there I was in the morning." They had passed her, the woman to
her room, the father to get his coat in the hall. Neither had touched
the child, though they had passed so near as almost to step over its
insensible form.

His arm went out to her again. "Poor little thing! I'm afraid I
can never understand all that your childhood was; only pity. But what
you say does not tend to make me pity--these people. Quite the
contrary."

In an instant, while he sat there unmoving, unchanged in aspect, a
flame of rage had wrapped him as a tree may be robed in fire, leaving
him for the moment gripped helpless and listening only
half-consciously to her words.

"You shouldn't pity me," she murmured, and continued, "it must
have been that, perhaps, rather than my rational intelligence, which
taught me to be cold to both of them. Perhaps if any love for either
of them had been left afterward my heart should have been broken. As
it is--" She laughed bitterly.

"You know that as it is I am heartless." Yet this speech and the
eyes with which she looked at him as she said it made Richard Milne
wonder and hope. Clearly there had been a change, and she must have
learned in his absence to admit to herself whether or not she loved
him. The thought was enough: with mounting surety he felt that she
did love him, that this was the time appointed--that surely he and
Ada Lethen would not let go the chance of happiness without a
struggle. If only it were just a matter of duty. But it was not. For
so much of her life she had been bound to this place and to these
slowly petrifying people that she could not imagine herself apart
from them.

Perhaps the knot of the whole difficulty lay there. Desperately as
she might yearn, he felt that she could not conceive happiness.
Perhaps nothing but the death of one of those parents would bring her
awake--alone--drive her to living.

"Your heart was too tender for such storms. It makes me wild to
think of it--to think of your sitting there, hearing--" The vividness
of the picture he saw caused him to wince away from its unbelievable
pathos, its meagre sharpness, like the outline of a remote
folk-story, suddenly quickened to life by the lips of one of its
participants.

"I think I could repeat every word," she said quietly. "They--each
thought the other unfaithful. They proved that each was certain, no
matter how much the other denied it, and that they would be obliged
by every human consideration to hate each other to the end of life.
And they have never spoken to each other since."

"Never?" He mused with what seemed an idle particularity. His mind
had accepted the fact long since, so that it did not occur to him to
brand this inveterate silence as insane and foreign to humanity.
Everyone in his boyhood world had accepted it.

Night had set in, wild as autumn; out in the open wind tore the
darkness, the trees sighed loud, and colour was given to strain.
Among the sheltered recesses of the lawn, about the thick evergreen
trees, the hedge, and the veranda, the occasionally flawed quietude
allowed the mind, lulled and affrighted anew, to return again and
again to the turbulence without. A cricket or crickets took up their
cry, silenced, and returned. What portion could there be, what human
portion, but a strife of futility, meaningless turmoil? To watch it
was to be lulled, only to hear were peace; and he looked at her face,
hoping to hear her voice go on, sweetening the acrid past. But she
said nothing, the moment was gone; and on the flood of many
remembered longings and resolves surged back his single intent.

"Ada!" he burst out. "This is absurd. For anyone who could do
that, much as I might ultimately pity them, it's impossible to find
excuse or condolence. To pamper them emotionally all this time is
ridiculous. As your parents they will receive my respect; not
otherwise, I assure you. You know as well as I that unless some
definite course is undertaken nothing can be hoped.

"A course! What course?" she half moaned.

"But," he adjured her, "if you let things take their own way there
is bound to be a great deal of trouble and bitterness. You will find
that you have acquired nothing for the furnishing of your life but
sorrow and the memories of sorrow. You are even farther removed than
my own ideals are from the dogma of today. That arrivism,
opportunism, at best only cloaks the thirst for getting which is
rendering barren the lives we see everywhere. Materialism. Yet in a
degree we've got to recognize that it is based on the reality which
is foundation to material things. People get it reversed and think
that material things are the only basis of reality. But it is our
destiny: we are bound to conquer. We must subdue things; we've got to
take from life even the emotions, the experience, and fulfilment we
need. If we shirk that we are doing a wrong as great as that of
starving in the midst of nature's abundance." Words had betrayed him
again. He did not know whether she were listening.

"There's no use talking, sacrifice is all right. It is part of the
acceptance of life. Calmness and freedom from inordinate grasping is
good. But the fact which you and I have to face right now is that
happiness is not offered for ever in this world, it does not go
begging; and we have a right to all of it we can make, a duty to
ourselves which is imperative and primary, and only the fruition of
which enables us to do a duty to others."

She said nothing. He knew that she agreed with him, and that her
agreement would make no difference. She was not to be aroused by the
acrimony of the first part of his harangue, nor by the reasons of his
special plea. Though he spoke with a cool voice, emphatic
intonations, and at times almost judicial deliberation, he had become
warmed so that her inert silence met him like a chill barrier. He
felt that he had talked the "sales-talk" of a "go-getter" of his
city, city like an enthusiastic nightmare of another planet now.

What is there in her face, he asked himself with a sudden frenzied
access, what is there in her soul, that has made me return, time
after time--made my nights a memory and my days a double vision?
Love? It was to laugh at the simplicity of the tiny word. Who had
told that love was torture of the being, that love would blast life
from him in a flutter of trivialities as oak-leaves are loosed upon
the wind after the first frost? Who had told him that love would eat
beneath his comfort in accomplishment until he knew himself in his
wanderings a lost soul? Beneath everything, his most cherished
activities, lay a weary impatience with them and a sense of their
irrelevance in the lack of a determining motive to channel their
force.

She turned to him, and it was as though she had descried a vision
of beatification in the darkness; she took his hand as though she
would warm it in her cold hand. But the light in her face slowly died
as her low voice, with pauses, unwonted uncertainties here and there,
went on. Again, as though tranced, he had nothing but to listen,
given up not to her reasonings, but to her, the spirit beneath, which
embraced not only them and her conduct, but the very qualities which
made her to him what she was. And it was her hand which was wanned,
though a gesture lifted both to her breast.

"Richard, I know. That is what makes it so hard, that I do
understand. Oh, don't think I don't want happiness, that I am harsh.
But I have found the hardest thing to do. ... I see Father going
about the farm as though he were lost; and his hair is white. . . .
Like his horses, he is old; like them, he is patient, even in waiting
for the end. What should I be doing to leave him? There is some other
way. My mother seems daily to give her frail life to the white
narcissi; and, while she is not old, she makes me fear the more. You
can see how it is with me, and how I must not listen to--the outer
world, even to-- even as I have. ..." Her voice broke as if from a
weight of longing which would return in after days.

Richard Milne's impelling desperation would no longer be kept
within bounds. He seemed to find her pleas unanswerable as she had
his. He rose from the seat. His voice quivered. A fear that they were
cutting themselves off from each other as they had done before did
not suffice to temper his embittered discomfiture, which he scarcely
cloaked in polite circumstantiality.

"It is late and I must not keep you, Ada. We must talk again," he
added with a perverse effort at balance. He was facing the window
giving on the dark room; across it he saw the crack of light under
the door, which showed that life went on in the rear portions of the
house. "I hope my intrusion hasn't kept your mother too long from her
bulbs." To this irrepressible malice in jejune and childish
politeness Ada made a vague gesture and rose as he went on: "I am
going to have a talk with your parents. They, too, may not be able to
understand reason and common logic, but at least they shall listen.
It is late now, and I shall not disturb them."

She put out her hand. "I'm sorry, Richard." She said it so simply
and with such significance that his anger melted, and he half felt
that he was defeated once more. Then his stubborn pugnacity whelmed
the feeling. He grasped her extended hand.

"Give them my regards, please, and tell them that. We'll see."

Smiling a little at his grimness, the tall woman murmured :

"Tm sure they'll be glad to see you again. They have so few
visitors, and they remember you, of course. Father was asking why you
hadn't seen him the last time you were here."

"I look at the whole thing differently now," he declared again. "I
must see them both regardless of any kind interest they may have in
me."

Ada Lethen became grave. "Richard, you mustn't look at it in that
way. There's nothing to get angry about, nothing to be done." She
looked at him with steadfast, upraised eyes.

"That remains to be seen, and will be seen. Good night, Ada."

Smiling a little, she stood on the veranda and watched him quickly
swallowed in the gloom of the night, his footsteps muffled by the
grass and pine needles, by the wind roaring above him, wrapping him
with huge tatters in the road.

He was gone.

5

He did not seem to have slept at all before strange noises,
shoutings, silences, came and went in what he knew was dreaming.
Strangely actual seconds only made a dream of the reality from which,
tossing, he had tried through the night to find surcease. They merged
with dozing unbelief in his return--so ineffectual--and his presence
in a place alienated which should have welcomed him. . .. Richard
Milne rose, bumping his head upon the gable ceiling, and stepped to
the open window.

Dawn had come, lifting sharp colour from the fields. In a haze of
level yellow sunshine on the dusty lane below, Carson Hymerson and
his son manoeuvred and spoke, the voices ringing back from the shady,
cliff-like barns at the far side of the yard. The skeleton of a
hayrake stood between them, and they were fitting teeth into a long
horizontal bar. Richard Milne had an impulse to laugh at the
oblivious and loud-voiced preoccupation. Carson bent, showing patches
on the back of faded clothes, clawed the air at one side of him
without turning his head, and spoke with injured tones of imperial
dudgeon.

Arvin, a tall, bowed young man with prominent, aquiline features,
went to the wire fence of the lane and lifted from it the piece which
providentially hung there. His father viciously twisted the wire
about the wooden bar and the rod on which the teeth were strung. It
was evident that it would be impossible to insert the teeth between
them.

"Now! What you gawpin' at me for? You've let the others loose, and
now they've jumped out of the holes. If ever I see--"

Arvin, who had been contemplating his father's mistake, said
nothing, but hastily jumped to the other end of the bar and held it
against the teeth. His father continued to whine, until he said
abruptly:

"Well! You told me to get the wire, and now see what you've
done."

"You're too smart!" shouted his father without rancour. "It's all
your fault. You just think we shouldn't be doing it ourselves, that's
all, and you won't help."

The son digested this a moment, seeming about to speak, and then
to think better of it.

"It's all right for you to talk," went on the older man, turning
the teeth of the rake on the steel rod delicately until they hung
loosely in a perfect row. "Yes, eh, send it to the blacksmith; don't
do anything yourself for fear of getting your hands dirty. No, I'm
not farming that way just yet.... I don't say but what if I was gone,
stowed away safe enough under ground, there'll be enough of that goes
on, but not just today, thank you, too rich for my blood. That ain't
how the old pioneers got along. If your grandfather could see the
slouchy way you do things, he'd turn over in his grave. Reach me that
chisel...."

"Yeh, I bet he'd--"

"Don't you leave go!" yelled Hymerson. "People are getting more
shiftless all the time. For a certainty."

Richard Milne stared half-awake from his window, and the
argumentative, swift whine, with outbursts of shouting, the quiet,
occasional remonstrance of the younger man ascended to him as though
he were watching a play; until with a start he straightened and
returned to bed. They even pursued him there. So he was back arnid
the oblivion of the farmer's cares! It was a rousing reality. The
possibility of sleep was gone for that night, and, seeing that it was
nearly six o'clock according to the thin watch under his pillow, he
dressed. In the kitchen he greeted Mrs Hymerson, who was holding a
slice of bread on a fork over the lidless hole of the wood stove.

"I've been going to get me a regular toaster," she remarked
offhandedly, "but I haven't got around to it yet." Richard wondered
what formalities connected with the man of the house would be
necessary before this could be accomplished. Meanwhile it semed
likely that smoke would contribute as much as heat to the texture of
the toast. "I didn't put your hat in the front hall," she added, as
instinctively the young man reached to the nail behind the door.
"Doesn't seem right to treat you like ordinary company so much--"

Outside the shade was chill and the air quiet, as though the trees
had forgotten the struggle with the wind of the night before. The
dust of the lane appeared to have been swept by it, smoothed from so
much as a leaf upon the surface. The spirit of those gusty hours had
belatedly entered Carson Hymerson.

"If he does stay it'll be all right for us. He won't know anything
about it and people won't--"

The farmer was still ejaculating and gesturing, unaware of his
guest's approach. Arvin tried to warn him of it by smiling and
leaving the rake with outstretched hand to greet his early friend.
"Here! What's the idea--" Then the other saw too.

Arvin Hymerson was perhaps an inch taller than Richard Milne when
he straightened, and his rather bashful smile was not belied by the
freshet of reminiscent inquiry with which such meetings are
accompanied. Still the interest was there, real, and Richard Milne
found himself feeling that he had been away perhaps two weeks. For
the first time he fully realized his return. When the weather had
been canvassed Arvin said:

"We're fixing up the old side-delivery rake. Kind of late getting
around to it, but we thought we'd better do it ourselves instead of
sending it to the blacksmith."

The older man looked up from the teeth of the rake and grinned
mockingly.

"Arvin here's been buying a cow. I was just telling him he'd ought
to have been making a regular study of the market before he went out.
Then he'd been sure not to get beat."

Richard smiled. "Oh, I should think that Arvin must know a good
deal about cattle, Mr Hymerson. I don't think I'd care to have a
trade with him myself." He was not accusing Arvin of dishonesty. He
found himself sympathetically taking on the attitude and locutions of
a former time.

"Not 'less you wanted to get beat, eh?" The man was somewhat
mollified. "Well, go and look at his cow. Just go and look at it, and
see what you think of the bargain. I'll tell you how much he gave
afterwards." A challenging malice spoke here, as though his son were
not present.

The latter, Richard Milne reflected after looking at the cow, a
goodly and not noteworthy Shorthorn, deserved consideration for his
patience; for his industry also, since the floors of the cow stable
were as spotless as its whitewashed cement walls. As though conscious
of his friend's attitude, Arvin remarked :

"Litter-carriers. Farming's not so bad as it used to be. Things
are getting a little handier."

They stood talking a few minutes at the doorway of the stable,
which framed a green and grey landscape, and then went to breakfast.
Richard Milne found himself in good spirits and inclined to play the
part of the well-entertained guest. This would not hurt his cause
with Mrs Hymerson, he knew. He had decided not to go back to the
city, and to let it rest with her whether he was to stay, "spend his
vacation," in that house. From Carson Hymerson, he divined, anything,
or nothing, might be expected.

The farmer had changed considerably with the years, from the young
man's memory of him--a surreptitiously waggish, brisk fellow taking
chop to mill, striding about the muddy streets in a yellow raincoat
and rubber boots, laughing and joking with other farmers on the steps
of the store. This present swiftness of speech, innuendo, and
attitude of not being taken in by anybody, was perhaps the result of
forces in the man which the years could not but have brought out.
Richard Milne had never ceased to admire the peripety of life, its
myriad fugacious shadings like lake tints which become more intricate
to the sight with care in scrutinizing them.

As they came out of the house after breakfast a team of horses
emerged from alders around the bend of the road, with a two-wheeled
implement surmounted by a barrel. On this a boy sat as though
precariously, for it was perched horizontally, and looked ready to
roll off. Two low, chair-like seats under and behind the barrel
almost dragged the ground between the wheels.

"Tobacco-planter," Arvin told him.

"Yes, that's a tobacco-planter!" added Hymerson, as though it were
a grim joke.

"Dad don't like the tobacco. Won't grow it. I keep telling him
we're going to lose out, with tobacco the price it is...."

"I guess, eh! I wouldn't have the dirty stuff on my place, let
alone smoke it, put the dirty stuff in my mouth. Agh! They can have
it, them fellows." He went, with swinging steps and one arm held out,
toward the pig-pen, a swill-pail brushing his bulky, stiffened
overalls at every step. Arvin grinned, looking from him to Richard
Milne.

He, too, went to the stable, and hitched a team to the rake. When
he had gone creaking down the lane Richard followed the older man
about while he did the chores, tended to the needs of the stock, and
prepared another meal for them. Then they walked over the roiling,
wooded farm together.

Carson said, as they crossed a hollow along a haphazard rail
fence:

"That's how he looks after things, that old man. Won't even keep
up the line fence between neighbours. I've had about enough of it,
never keeping the fences fixed, letting the cattle run--even
hogs."

Pausing to light a cigar, Milne asked thoughtfully, "Why don't you
make some settlement, say, have it that--if this is Lethen's end of
the line--that the fence should be fixed by him, or, if not, that you
will do so at his expense? I should think that some arrangement could
be made." He was tired of the man's complaints, and still more of his
rancorous air of compunction.

"Oh, that wouldn't hardly do. Might get to be bad friends with
him, that way." Carson glanced at him in alarm and joggled the two
forks on his shoulder.

"I don't see the point," murmured Richard. He knew that Hymerson
would talk about his injuries to any listener, and generally comport
himself as though in fact a breach existed between the neighbours. At
the hayfield which Arvin was raking Carson began to bunch a windrow,
but Richard did not accept the hint of the extra fork--let him stand
it in the ground and went away.

He walked across the fields and woods in the general direction of
the village. It was a day of the perfected tranquillity which only
June can match, and which even in June one feels unmatchable. The
clouds in their quietude only gave surcease from warmth and
brilliance to the surfeited vegetation and trees, only varied that
intense blue which had not yet lost its softness of spring, and
which, it seemed, could never take on the greenish bitterness of
first snow, the darkness of autumn storm.

The young man wandered for a time with the sense of well-being and
careless optimism tempering more individual feeling, even curious
recognition of old landmarks. And the fields were remarkably little
changed. Toward the river the banks, the dredged ditches leading into
it, the hedges of underbrush, preserved the old contours, and new
fencing was in evidence more usually in the fields nearer the fronts
of the farms and along the road. The lanes were the same as those
down which he had wandered in earliest times to the bush for wild
flowers in spring and nuts in autumn. Richard Milne sat curiously
aimless on a weathered, grey rail fence, looking at a rusty disc
harrow with a home-made log tongue, to which bark still adhered. A
huge, battered, old leather shoe had been nailed to the tongue for a
tool-box.

He was impressed anew with the true reasonableness of farm
practice. There was that about it which might appear elsewhere
inertia and shiftlessness. If an appliance served its appointed
purpose it was allowed to do so. There was no fever for the spick and
span, and even glittering new-painted machinery soon took on
protective colouring and comfortable, crude patchings. This was part
of the nature of farming, and when it was overruled it was at the
sacrifice of practical utility. He recalled visiting the farm of two
graduates of an agricultural college, and how his expectations of a
stricter formalization had been disappointed. Luckily farming did not
lend itself to the simplifications of hospital wards, scientific
laboratories, prisons. His experience with other departments of the
modernized world led him to thank God for it.

At the end of a field of oats, so sparse and short that he skirted
the patch as though in fear of injuring it, he came on a long, grey,
fine-clodded field divided into narrow rows formed by the packed
pattern of broad wheels. They belonged to a tobacco-planter, he
guessed, because the tiny plants were in evidence, withered almost to
nothing. And there was a man not far from the other ends of the
field, stooping over a row. Picking his way, Richard Milne advanced
toward the figure. It strode to meet him, carrying a basket and a
pail a few steps, then stooping, piercing a hole in the dry earth
with a blunt stick, pouring water into the hole from the pail, and
taking a plant from the basket, planted it. By the time he could
follow this procedure he could see the man distinctly, his gaunt
angular movements of stooping, planting, his swift strides forward,
while the eyes were busy with the ground before him, seeking
unplanted spaces and withered plants which must be replaced. In the
gait and these gestures there was something familiar, and he
lingered, trying to remember before he should have passed. He was on
the old home place, on Bill Burnstile's farm. That was it!

But Bill was not going to let him pass. Lit by the sun under a
drooping straw hat as tanned as itself, his face was leanly
smiling.

Their hands held. "Fine family, Bill. I was certainly surprised
too. When did you come back from the West?"

"Oh, we came back about a year ago. Well, a year last winter. Time
certainly flies. You're looking well, though I can't say I'd have
known you in a crowd. Pretty pale," he chuckled, "like a city fellow.
Oh, well, the sun out here, the open air, you'll soon get brightened
up." He looked at Richard Milne with jovial compunction, as though he
were semi-invalid. That was the way, Richard knew, in which he
regarded all city men, categorically.

"Yes. Healthful weather just now. How are your crops. Bill? Clover
seems to have a pretty good stand around here. What happened to
everybody's oats?"

Bill Burnstile's lantern jaws opened in a vast "Haw, haw!" and he
bent back. "You certainly ain't forgot all about farming, I can tell
you that much."

Richard Milne could not imagine anyone else of the locality making
such distinctions. Of course, impervious stolidity might have its
compensations. ... In rural people it was often a part of instinctive
caution.

It had been impossible, Bill was explaining, to put in the oats at
the proper time. The ground was too wet, and even so lots of men had
had to dub them in, any way to get them in, hopeless of good weather,
and determined to have a few for their horses at least. Altogether it
had not been a very good season. Now there was this drought. The bad
weather was not ended yet, or he was mistaken. Still, there couldn't
be a failure in everything--like in the West, where grain constituted
the main asset. There a crop failure meant something.

"It was our West, of course," mused Richard. "When a Canadian
'goes West,' it usually means the Canadian West."

"Yes. . . . Have you been out yet?" The loose-jointed fellow
seemed to take root in the ground, as though to stay there
indefinitely talking.

"No. I'm sorry to say it, but I've never been there yet, not
explored much of the world at all."

"Oh, I understood you had become a regular Yankee by this time. I
was wondering whether we'd ever have you back with us at all or not.
That's how it turns out, you know, when they get away once."

"On the contrary, this place has scarcely been out of my mind.
Naturally, when one's been raised. ... Do you find it changed at all
since your return?"

"Well, no, can't say I do. Of course, they grow more tobacco than
they ever did. That began in the war, of course. Then there were a
couple of years there they had to give away what they had.
Over-production, I guess, or some warfare between the companies. That
was just about the time I got back, and it looked kind of silly to
me. But some way I got around to thinking it may be all right to put
a few acres in. I see the other fellows doing it, anyway. Of course,
I got enough of putting all my eggs in the one basket out West. When
there's rust, frost, or anything, hail, you just naturally lose your
year's work."

The lank, brown, musing face was wrinkled, Richard saw a spear or
two of white in his yellow temples. The man was changed and
unchanged. The West, its gambling hazards, even a roving life had
seemed more fitting to him than his present situation. He had been
the dare-devil hail-fellow to innumerable scrapes in his youth in
this circumscribed place. But then, he had met a woman, acquired a
wife, the Waterloo of that character.

It was a fate, Richard Milne thought he saw, which had completely
humanized the harum-scarum; or, if not completely, so well that he
was now to be counted upon for half-conscious, humorous
understanding: in effect, since a descent to the practical was
inevitable, for support. Having seen the world and touched the
commonplace of romance, he would rightly estimate the commonplace,
and see its quartz-glitter in the dust of his hands.

No, he would not be suspecting these things in himself, and that
would make half his value in a self-conscious world such as Richard
Milne had come to know. A true man, which is something different from
a nice fellow, his tough, lean body, his brown, lean face told
something about him; he was as old now as he had looked ten years
ago, as he would be in ten years' time. For his hearer the remarkable
thing, so frequently invoked in print, was that Here was a gentleman
who had never read a book.

Meanwhile he, too, was stirred by the meeting, while the talk went
on of crops. Only when such matters had been dealt with very
thoroughly was it that Richard, about to leave, spoke again of the
family.

"Yes, you've got to see the wife and our boys and girls while
you're here. We're a regular tribe now. When I look at you, only a
couple of years, ain't it, younger, it seems hard to believe."

"Well, we've both been away a long time. Time enough to have
acquired a wife, you know." His tone was somewhat grim, though he
tried to veil it with a smile.

"Well," declared the other in his turn, "my luck changed just as
soon as we got married. And now, with a family, I've got to kep
pegging away, so it doesn't seem to have a chance to change." He
laughed.

"That's good. Why, here they come now!"

A sound echoing from the trees at the end of the field made them
turn. A boy and a girl were running toward them, halfway across,
while two little boys were climbing the fence. As they ran barefoot
over the soft, even, warm ground, with cries back and forward to each
other, light-hearted, breathless, light-footed, Richard Milne stood
transfixed for a second, permeated with a sense of his own childhood.
Intently looking at the stranger, and their father, expecting who
knew what cryptic spoken index of the mysterious world of which they
guessed only that it was wonderful, they came forward.

"Well, you're puffing, Bill." The older Bill put his hand on the
boy's bristling yellow head, half shoving playfully. "This is Alice,"
he added of the girl, whom Richard had seen on the road the day
before. "This gentleman used to live here when he was as little as
you."

"This farm, this very farm?" Bill wanted to know.

"Right here," the man assented, smiling. "But I used to be
everywhere, when I could get away."

"A great rover you used to be, Dick. Remember when we used to go
for hickory nuts to old Broadus's place? Nobody else's was as good,
because he didn't want us."

The two raced up in silence, even more nearly breathless than the
others. "He's going to let me plant 'em," gasped a seven-year-old
chubby, dark boy, not stopping to pant, but seizing the basket in his
father's hand. He looked up, his long, silky lashes glistening, his
dark skin shining. He was like a sleek baby animal, and somehow
different from the others. They eyed his manoeuvre with misgiving,
and knew better than to try to take the basket from him. The third
boy, who had run with him, was evidently the oldest, thin, tall,
stooped, with open mouth and light eyes.

"Now we've lots of help," mused Bill Burnstile. "I'm kind of
juberous about letting you go at it; but maybe, if your sister looked
after you, you could do a good job. Suppose Bill carries the basket,
and Tom takes the plant out of it, while Johnnie here punches the
hole with the stick. Alice can walk along behind and see that you
keep straight in line with the row. And don't waste the plants, and
don't miss any out. Give Bill the basket now, Johnnie." The dark eyes
were hurt, but Johnnie took his assigned part.

"This drought makes it bad," Burnstile explained, once more
turning to his visitor. "I kept working the ground up to keep the
moisture in, and waiting for a rain. Got her in finally, day before
yesterday, but no rain yet to help much."

"It makes a lot of work, when you've got to go over the whole
field this way and transplant." Richard laughed, looking at the group
of children hurrying down the row, stopping in a bunch, then running
on. "Seems funny to see these infants planting tobacco. One thinks of
nobody but men having been near that. Carson Hymerson was telling me
this morning he doesn't approve of growing it."

"Carson's funny. Of course, it's hard on the land. But that isn't
why he doesn't grow it."

"A more personal objection?" Richard raised his eyebrows.

"Seems like it. Arvin, he's grown to be quite a sensible fellow,
though. And that's a wonder. He's sure working under disadvantages.
Why, the boy can't open his mouth, can't say it's a fine day, but
what the old man wants to argue. He'll argue black's white just to
make out the boy's a liar. Doesn't matter to Carson that he's got to
seem one himself. Perhaps he wants to provoke the boy to calling him
one. What he does want I don't know, nor I guess he don't neither.
It's a wonder Arvin doesn't give him such a back-hander! With me he
wouldn't live long, or I wouldn't. Oh, he's a tartar."

"I seemed to see some change in the man. Something's
wrong. Something seems to be troubling him."

"Well," said Bill Burnstile consideringly, "I've been among gangs
of men, and I know just about how long he'd keep a whole skin if he
acted that way...."

"He seems," Milne insisted on the word, "to have worries about the
line fence between himself and Lethen. He was telling me a good deal
about that."

"Does Mr Lethen farm all of his own land himself?" Richard cared
little that he was exaggerating the casual tone of his query.

"No; this tobacco's been a good thing for him. He fits up a few
acres, and lets it on shares, and makes a little money that way. The
rest of the farm he pastures, and grows some stuff on. Of course, he
can't keep a hired man," said Bill Burnstile, looking him in the
eyes. "Never has for years and years, they tell me. You'd know all
about that, of course, as well as me. A fellow's got to feel sorry
for him."

"It seems that nothing has changed...." Richard's voice was tinged
by a fleeting memory of those very words between himself and Ada
Lethen.

"Naw." The gaunt man spat. "Of course, there's something there you
and me can't make out. I guess old lady Lethen is all right, from
what I've always gathered. It just seems funny these days. I've heard
my father talk about people who never spoke to each other, but I
never come across but those two.... Makes it hard for the girl. Now
she's smart, right sensible. If they would let her alone she'd fix
things up, run the farm-- there must be a mortgage--in no time, just
like nothing; good head on her. But them--why they don't seem
livin'."

"Strange existence," mused the young man, wondering at the
interest generated, and impelling the man's words.

"You understand me, they don't seem alive," continued Bill
argumentatively. "Now when I'd go over there to borrow a tool or
something, and get to the door, the old lady would be so polite, just
as nice as pie, ask about the family, tell me where she thought I
might find the old man, and all that. But if he wasn't home, no use
leaving any message with her. Might as well save your breath. She'd
never tell him anything if it was going to save you from the grave.
Makes it unhandy that way for the neighbours."

Richard Milne roused himself from the reverie which he knew might
divert the interest of his companion, and, without replying to the
reference to Ada Lethen, took leave, after promising to visit the
family some day soon.

6

Somehow the day had become overcast for him. It was as though a
shadowy thought of happiness had been driven from his mind by some
intervening emergency, and now he could not even recall in what this
mood consisted. Probably it was no more than morning hope and healthy
spirits. And those were as likely to be illusion as the anonymous
doubt which was now filling his mind. At least he could not blame
Bill Burnstile. He should have been--he was, he told
himself--gratified by the encounter with this old friend of his
boyhood, now a man, honest, simple, rough, real, true to himself, and
open-eyed to what reality came his way.

It was what the man had told of the Lethens which bothered him.
Somehow he must have thought that he possessed the secret in his own
right, and that, possessing it, he might be able alone to unf athom
the riddle. Behold now, though, others had watched, baffled, even
dispirited as himself by the sight. Bill Burnstile had talked as
though absorbed by the subject, though without ulterior intent; and
Carson Hymerson spoke with bitterness. Richard could not help
wondering whether all the neighbours were so deeply concerned,
whether an atmosphere had not been caused to rise about these people
which would forever forbid his imposing reality or recognition upon
them. In what reality did they believe? What could he have believed
in Ada Lethen's place?

He was sitting on an old wooden gate at the head of a green lane
which sloped down into a farm, with no buildings in sight, and he
jumped off to continue his walk when he saw the girl before him. He
paused. It was Ada Lethen who came up to him. The stateliness which
he had known in the dusk of last night was modified by a languor
which must have been weariness, for he saw that she was really thin.
Her smile quite transfigured her dark, pale face; her eyes remembered
themselves in a glint of happiness, looking at him steadfastly.

"You're going the wrong way," he told her with an assumption of
country jocosity. It seemed that for surprise of joy he could have
leaped the high gate before her.

"I am? I hadn't any particular place in view--"

"Just out for a walk?" he interrupted urgently. "Then you may as
well come with me."

She looked back over her shoulder at the forest into which the
lane ran. "But I just did come out of that bush. I rather expected,"
she drawled softly, "that there might be some wild flowers there.
Perhaps I'm too late. But then I didn't happen to think of them
before ..."

They walked along the grass of the wide, rail-fenced lane, down
and up the slopes of which twined branching cow-paths, worn in other
years by droves of belling, tranquil animals. The morning was passing
in a mellow green quiet, which seemed to Richard Milne loud with
another clamour than that of the city: his awakened hopes, a tumult
of memories and desire. Looking at her beside him, he heaved a great
breath and said:

"I can hardly believe it, but here I am. Here are you, what's
more. Here are we!" he sang suddenly in the echoes of the trees.
"Whatever foundling gods take the place of Pan, we are here!"

She smiled slightly at his enthusiasm of a boy; her generous lips
seemed trembling to a smile as they walked. "I'm inclined not to come
out very often. I think today is the first since winter that I have
left the farm like this. In winter, spring, autumn, it's good to come
and see that there is growth, change, and death, nothing of which is
bitter or gay, simply because it does return again. It does return
again.... Yet in that way, too, it is very precious. But you don't
wish me to be serious," she laughed.

He was silent, not knowing how to convey his risen spirits, and
not daring to try for fear of jarring on her mood. She had kept
inviolate for a few far-parted days of the year this desire to
commune with nature, and had avoided the chafing with which
day-by-day intercourse would have blunted her love. And this to her
was everything, everything tangible of beauty beyond the poignant and
trivial dullness of her days. After all, she scarcely had realized,
save as a rumour, that there was another world beyond these fields.
Had she not known the world of poetry, ideas, she perhaps would not
have been conscious of loving them, nor ever have known the fear of
love, that fear that she could grow to hate them, though her
bitterness would be the mere working of monotony. Then she would wish
that, like the clod-like people about her, she had never learned to
love them. She looked about her with quiet eyes, not asking of the
forest that it be to them rest from vain study, but that it be its
strange self as it had been to her childhood memories, when in
earlier spring she never forgot to come out for wild flowers, and
sometimes little Dick Milne went beside her, and they raced each
other to clustered violets or more common wet-rooted mayflowers, shy
lady-slippers.

They paused as they had done in those times, and looked up the
long trunks of rough trees, to the feathery, cloudy upper branches,
and there, as in an old afternoon, circled a crane, its long, thin
legs and neck stuck straight out against the sky: soared and soared
in the opening above the feathery boughs, huge, until they thought
they were staring up phantom trees, pillars of a dream, immeasurably
high.

"Oh, it makes me dizzy!" The girl lowered her head.

"We must have looked up quite a while," the man muttered. "Ada, do
you remember the time we saw a crane when we were children? We stared
and stared just the same, and you were dizzy that time too. Seems
impossible to believe that bird's not going to do something
interesting. Does he see our faces in the rift of treetops, and
wonder what those strange, wavering bulbs are going to do, whether
they are a menace or. ... The bush is drier now than it was in those
days. I remember it was all pools under the trees, brown with dead
leaves. I thought you were going to fall into one when you became
dizzy looking up."

"It's later now ... later in the year."

They walked forward. "And the land all about is drained now. How
vast the bush seemed, and echoey then. Now we know how few acres it
is, and how small a mystery."

They spoke of a girlhood and boyhood it seemed impossible to know
would never return. It seemed that they had been nearer together then
than now or at any time during the long siege of her. He remembered
the first day Ada had gone to school at the little frame schoolhouse
at the cross-roads, and how he and she had walked home on opposite
sides of the road, along the ditch banks without a word. Soon they
became friends and compared the lunches which they carried to school
in tin pails, and shared them at noon. The teasing of the older
children stopped this, and they did not pay much attention to each
other during the day at school. But they always walked home together,
until a new family moved to a neighbouring farm and provided Ada with
the company of other girls. Later they walked together when the
privilege of carrying her books had come to mean much to Richard.

Through these years he had been scarcely aware of her parents save
as a rumour in the mouths of other children. Grown people seemed to
keep silence about them. They must have been utterly indifferent to
anything the little girl did away from their sight. She never spoke
of them, and you could not think of her with them. She seemed perfect
alone, needing no one. She was neatly dressed at school, on occasion
came to Sunday school with neighbour girls, and looked a distinct and
exotic creature among them. Scarcely ever in his memory had he seen
Mrs Lethen. Once she had been driving past in a buggy with Ada, and
picked him up. He had never forgotten the consciousness of her
presence under the narrow buggy-top as they drove down the muddy
road.

Mr Lethen was seen more, at threshing tables, in neighbours'
houses, at meetings of the municipal council, of the school
ratepayers, and so forth. He was not disposed to take a keen interest
in his duties as a citizen, but his neighbours, knowing him a man of
intelligence and some education, from time to tune pressed him into
certain offices. He was known to have queer ideas, and by some this
was laid to his being educated, and by others to his year-long
misunderstanding with his wife; while others took it as one of the
reasons the two had not been able to get on together. More of the
women, however, sympathized with him than the men. Farming
indifferently, he pursued a casual course among his neighbours, as
though there was nothing to be remarked about him, and it was quite
ordinary to live a life with neither an impelling motive nor the
warmth of family ties.

He never appeared in public with Mrs Lethen, and when it was
necessary to have people in the house she was not present. On her
side, she avoided association with other women, often did not answer
knocks at the door, and one who came of an afternoon to call was
likely to go away puzzled. It was something to be marvelled at that
their life could continue in the community and the family take its
part therein as an efficient unit, while Mrs Lethen remained apart,
indifferent, or malign, present-in-absence.

Her hold on her daughter became more apparent as the girl grew up,
and a second estrangement, Richard Milne recalled, had come between
him and Ada Lethen. She seemed to grow away from him. Music had been
her passion, and she had lent herself to it wholly. Her parents,
indulgent or indifferent, had allowed her unchecked progress with
elementary teachers, local girls returned from the Toronto
conservatory, who insisted that Ada must "go on" with her "wonderful
touch." Who knew what triumph of musical splendour might yet be
released? Music--it was the impelling passion of her life, by which
she existed.

But even in those days the girl had begun to attempt composition
of her own. She began to be haunted by the strange tantalizings which
are known to the genius of expression. She would be in despair or
dullness. Or a muted ecstasy came over her, in which, so high was her
vision of the beauty she wanted to embody, she did not dare attempt
composition. Everything was hard for her. It was unbearable to remain
silent, chilling the music from her heart with duties of the
household day; and unbearable to yearn for composition, filled with
ineffable impulses which she knew from old would not flower into the
singing perfection of art.

Something had happened between their infrequent meetings. Richard
had known that, youth as he was; but he had not questioned her
closely then or later. She told him that she was not leaving home.
The most her willingness could explain was that the music affected
her too strongly. She couldn't bear it, and the house was silent for
ever, the piano closed, looking like a giant black bier, until it was
moved into a storeroom of the rambling house, never opened. And after
that again he had not seen her for months. Her mother had had a long
illness; Ada had nursed the woman through it, at the same time
helping her father and carrying on the household....

Looking at her now, it came to him that Ada Lethen had become that
inaccessible music which had tortured her until she could bear it no
more. There had been, finally, in her nineteenth year, what the local
doctor had called a "nervous breakdown." This had been temporary, and
seemed to leave no trace beyond the resignation which baffled her
lover now, a sort of nihilism of the emotions, not of the will, which
kept her from any new courses, or even acquiescence in the validity
of the projects he urged. Yet she seemed strong; her activity
dominated the family, which probably, as she said, would fall to
pieces without her. It was strength which seemed to be in her soul
now, beneath a wild vibrancy to ineffable spiritual intimations he
could only guess, and in wonderment reverence.

But again, was it with her as she said, as she believed she felt?
She feared that the lives of her parents, her mother, would tumble
into ruin if she left them. But did she fear, too, that, lacking
their supporting needs, she would collapse, become useless, a
recluse, prey once more to music or to love more poignant and
devastating still? He would bring all this to light; he would conquer
it. He had been gathering his forces during all the months of being
apart from her. Now he would test his will, his love for her, his
belief in their happiness, test his whole ultimate life and hers.
Perhaps his failures, his diversion to the course of ambition, had
been a preparation, his own development for the goal which his
imagination had held before him in a vision of her.

They had come out of the forest before they knew, and were walking
in a by-path near the bank of the river. Their wanderings had
transgressed line fences so vaguely that they did not know whose farm
they were crossing. But they knew that the river glided smooth,
occasionally revealed below them, the trees were gracious, the vines
and hedges veiling. Far ahead of them loomed the top of a broad beech
tree, among the slim second growth spared from the axe along the
banks. Nearer, its quick leaves glittered before them as though it
grew from the middle of the river. And indeed when they came up and
stood on the bank opposite the towering old tree, they saw that, far
below, it held an isthmus of its own from the river, which was forced
to twine about its roots in springtime, but ran several yards away in
a sunken bed now. The knoll beneath the trees was high, grassy,
sheltered on one hand by a bend in the creek bank, and on the other
by two cedars overgrown and joined to form a screen by creeping
morning glory vine, which wrapped them to the tips. It was a place
for shelter from too rough winds, from sun, and all noise and unquiet
they looked into; but there seemed no path leading down to it.

They had scarcely walked fifty feet on along the lane before they
met Carson Hymerson, both forks on his shoulder, evidently going home
to dinner. The small, thick, stooped man looked at them quickly,
suspiciously once, mumbled something, and had passed.

They looked at each other, and Richard Milne smiled.

"He won't be expecting you home for dinner now," Ada said with a
soft drawl, "so you'd better come home with me. Never mind," she said
with sudden decision as he began to excuse himself. "I want you to
meet Mother, and it's no inconvenience."

She laughed a little. "Yes, but I wonder whether I do. One thinks
one knows this one and that one, when, if one did, things would be
different; there would be no flaws in intercourse."

"Obviously here there are. But don't you think that it is possible
to know people too well for their comfort and yours?"

"Perhaps, if you know them without sympathy. But then if you
didn't sympathize you couldn't know anyone perfectly. Could you? And
if you did know a person perfectly you would be compelled to
sympathize with him."

"Perhaps." Richard Milne was not tempted to explore this
syllogism. "Still, people don't like to be understood. Not really.
Not too well; and perhaps it is fortunate I don't understand Carson
Hymerson. But he does cause me to speculate."

"I think my father does him, too," she said with an intonation of
sadness. "If only such people would resign themselves not to
understand. They seem to think that since my father is what they call
'queer,' they are licensed for any means to attain their ends, the
petty ends of trickery. They do manage to bother him; it can't be
denied. I can't see why they should attempt to do so, or what they
hold against him. I suppose to see anyone unhappy arouses a sadistic
tendency in coarser minds." Her voice trembled.

"Ada," broke in Richard Milne, his tones sharp and yet heavy, "you
just tell me when anything overt--but, of course, nothing can happen,
save by the rarest mischance. I'd just like to see them bother you."
Ada looked up at the savageness of his tone. A thwarted anger
struggled within him at the thought that this girl should be forced
to consider such a trifle as he denominated the rest of the
community, the rest of the world.

Her eyes met his intense gaze, then looked away and filled, while
she caught her breath. "Dear boy . . ." she murmured. "Nothing's
going to happen."

"Promise me you will," he insisted.

"Yes. I shall be glad of any help you can give." She spoke in the
steady tones of one unwilling to reveal an invisible burden.

"Ada!" He stopped, unsatisfied, as though uncertain of what he
wished to say to her, or of how he was to say it. "You don't seem to
realize my right--haven't I earned it?--to want to protect you, in
all the years you've ruled my life." He laughed shakily. "Why, my
dear, I wouldn't be here. . . . Love is like--"

"Hush!"

"Like an intermittent fever." He had stopped in his
preoccupation.

"Hush!" She stepped back toward him, taking his hand. "We are
nearly there. Let's talk about--anything--dinner, until you can eat
it! You're too late for the locust blossoms." She waved her hand
above them.

They walked along together beneath the high, grey-barked trees
with their fine, small leaves. The upper branches showed dead, broken
off straight and blunt on the tops of the trees, and would have been
even more conspicuous by contrast when the great white blooms of
locust were interspersed among them.

When the pair reached the road the dust was deeper, but they saw
that their shoes already had been covered by the deposit on the
grasses of the lanes. In noonday silence and glare the river road was
like a snake twining into the shade of the weeds, as it wended below
uneven elms and clumps of wild apple, sumach, and elderberry in the
fence corners. The road made Richard silent, perhaps with a memory of
his walk along it the afternoon before and the night before, perhaps
with the memories of earlier times.

7

Under this white glare of sunlight the Lethen place was
appreciably less ominous and more dilapidated than it had appeared
the previous night. The very trees edging the lawn at the road and
along the drive seemed veterans recalling many storms. Rust-coloured
needles and rotting cones were strewn beneath the evergreens in arcs
which encroached upon the uneven and tufted grass. The brick gables
of the house above the Virginia creeper were bleached and eroded of
mortar like the face of a harridan washed of paint in the morning
light. The roof, dirt-coloured shingles edged with green, looked
water-soaked, and as they walked toward it Richard Milne could see a
thread of sky through the top of an ornate, tall, ochre chimney.

"Your house doesn't seem to change," he remarked, grasping at
symbolism as he spoke, "but still it does. It's becoming more
dilapidated and worn, more forsaken-looking every year."

"Ah, forsaken." She laughed. "At any rate you don't say, as almost
anyone else would, that it looks smaller than your memories of
it."

"No, not smaller. Nothing connected with it could dwindle." He
brought the implication to light.

Ada Lethen sighed, and they walked up the damp and shady lane in
silence, turned across the unfenced lawn, and stood on the patch of
grass, which was turning yellow from exposure to the sun, before the
veranda.

"Come right in," said Ada, as he hesitated on the sagging veranda.
"It's time I got dinner. Or would you rather wait here?"

He shook his head, and they went into a front room of
indeterminate size and character, until his eyes became used to the
dimness. Vague huge patterns adorned the wallpaper; the carpet was
green, with great yellow scrollings. A sewing-machine stood in one
corner, and in another stood a wood-burning stove without a pipe.
Above was the hole in the ceiling through which it would have to
reach the chimney, and glancing up, Richard Milne fancied that he
heard a hasty stirring, silenced at once. Ada had retreated to the
back of the house, after having murmured something about her mother.
The young man crossed his knees and prepared to look as much more at
ease than he felt, as the impending presence of Mrs Lethen would
allow.

Until now he had not noticed the table, perhaps because, directly
before him, it was too obvious. A large square dining-table, covered
with a dark chenille cloth extending in shadowy pattern almost to the
floor. On the cloth rested two large bowls, bearing each three bulbs
of white narcissi, all in flower, and nicely arranged with the
tallest in the middle of each bowl. The brilliance of these flowers,
hard as flame for all their whiteness, seemed to diffuse a certain
radiance throughout the dun room, with its two windows latticed by
the creeping vine. The window-sills themselves, he noticed, each bore
more bulbs, and the sewing-machine in the corner must have had one,
but for the necessity of use, for it was opened, and on a chair
beside it stood still another vase.

A gaunt, pale woman entered at this moment, and it was with
something like terror in his surprise that Richard rose, facing her
haggard and piercing eyes, even as Ada appeared behind her.

She grasped his hand, holding it high and limply for an instant,
and then dropped it. Something made Ada speak, as though the two were
strangers newly met.

"Mr Milne has consented to stay to dinner with us, but I'm afraid
he'll have a little wait, for I've just put the potatoes on to boil.
I spent too long on my walk, it seems. But we'll be alone."

The woman peered into his face quickly, but without seeming to
have heard her daughter's last words. Then with a sharp glance aside
she took a chair, laughing.

"Yes, you'll have to see to dinner, now you've said you
would."

"I've every sympathy with her intentions," remarked Milne, "and
I'm sure she can feel for us, since she has been out developing an
appetite of her own." He tried to put understanding and support into
his smiling attitude toward the girl. She turned away to the kitchen,
leaving the door open.

Silence seemed to deaden the air of the room like a gas. There was
nothing to be said to this lady, and the impression of the first
seconds that she was an enemy returned to him, became conscious, so
that he watched her critically.

Her dress was not old-fashioned: timeless rather, so that it would
have seemed to become her in any age or scene: a long black skirt, a
white shirt waist. Her hair was white, and though brushed straight
back, so abundant that it seemed a tangled mass. Her face was almost
equally colourless, except for black eyebrows, dark, burnt-out eyes.
Her mouth kept up a constant movement of mood or, he considered, of
calculated foiling of decipherment.

Half purposely he waited, feeling that she might be driven to
utterance. What things in her soul! A feeling of pity arose upon his
reverence of the mystery of life. His eyes roved hither and thither
about the room, as though unaccustomed to it, then, as if in resolved
defiance, rested upon the narcissi. She opened her lips.

"Look at them!" She extended her hand, smooth and well kept. "Look
at them. Aren't they beautiful?" She laughed abruptly, as at an
understatement so grotesque. "Beautiful!"

"Your narcissi are very nice," observed Richard Milne with sedate
inflections, "and you have a good number of them too!" He did not
veil the acid of his smile, behind firm eyes.

Her silence became remote as she looked at the flowers, then she
seemed to return to him, and finally she said, as though
satirically:

"They're worth coming a long way to see, aren't they, Mr
Milne?"

He had to own himself beaten at the futile and childish game of
discomfiture--what he called the feeling which gave rise to alarmed
pity, carrying anxiety into his mind. Candour was better than such
obvious perversity. There would have to be a reckoning, and he
struck, with a directness which surprised them both.

"Mrs Lethen," he contended in deliberate tones, "don't you find
something more beautiful in the souls of people about you than in
these flowers? Something warmer at least, that concerns you, your own
fate and your happiness, rather than a momentary pleasure of the
eyes. Are you sure that you have not raised up an idol? Are you not
likely to waken some time and find that everything vital in your life
is gone, and there is left only these wilted flowers to mock you?
What of the happiness of your daughter? Have you ever thought that
Ada deserved your support all your effort now, to gain the happiness
which the world, which life is saving for her, and which for reasons
which you know it may be hard for her to discover? It is possible to
look across the fields of everyday life to some mirage of mountains,
longing to be there, and to find after years that one's limbs are too
worn even to gather the valley flowers of reality. And then the
mirage dissolves; you are left with nothing who might have had all
the sweets of reality without the empty yearning of thwarted longing
for unseizable beauty. But how empty and cold is such beauty without
the part fulfilled by others. Think how wonderfully different Ada's
life would be, and your own. Sacrifice is the badge of motherhood,
and the honour of it finer than any flower.

Labelling himself a prig, he was consciously letting himself be
carried away, so that, while at first his feeling had driven him to
words, now the words were cumulating, carrying forward his
emotion.

"The world! Beauty! The soul! Idols!" Mrs Lethen's white face
laughed without interest or surprise at this long outburst. "Yes. I
have erected an idol, and since it gives more satisfaction to my
days, leavens them better than the clods of this dull life can, who
is to say me nay? If they give me the love everything and everyone
else denies me, what then?" She paused, as though surprised at this
revelation coming uncalled from her lips. "Sacrifice. How like a
man," she murmured, while her face took on a marble quietude, staring
now at the hole in the ceiling. Then abruptly she rose and passed
into the kitchen.

"Excuse me," she dropped in a perfect, conventionally polite tone
at the door, which she was closing. "I should help her."

"Indeed, yes!"

The young man remained plunged in thought, apart from his
consciousness of the house of his dreams and forebodings. He did not
raise his eyes; he was feeling that he had always been there, as Ada
had--living for himself her life--until the girl reappeared and
called him to the meal.

She was changed. He saw it while she enumerated casually the
excuses necessary for her extempore cooking, the tardiness and lack
of conveniences. He paid little heed to the neat, painted, and
oilclothed kitchen in which the table was set, with Mrs Lethen
opposite him and Ada pouring tea at the head. A kettle sang
diminuendo over a wood fire in a dull, huge stove, but a window was
open above the "fourth side of the table. Upon the sill a pad of fly
poison floated in water among a few dead flies. He spoke pleasantly
and generally at first. Ada was preoccupied with serving the dinner,
and Mrs Lethen maintained, of purpose, he saw, a watchful
silence.

As he talked and the meal progressed he became aware of an
obscene, unreasonable foreboding, and began to struggle with a sense
that he was talking against time, like a man waiting to be taken to
the gallows, who must conceal the fact. Ada replied to his remarks
with consideration, as though weighing the literal meaning of each of
them. The older woman's face, he now saw, was more fleshy than he had
supposed, and more paste-like in colour. Her mouth was rayed with
wrinkles gathering and slackening. With her chief attention on her
food, she regarded him from time to time with a detachment almost
amounting to hauteur. The oppression increased upon him, while with
desperate inquiry he cajoled his strange impulse to rise and be gone.
Surely it was all nothing. He had been recalling aloud old-time
friends and neighbours, then:

"Mr Lethen is not at home today?" he asked the face opposite him,
almost unaware of speaking at all, as one might unwittingly strike a
mortal blow in a melee of combat.

The attitude of Ada Lethen gave him a feeling of having impudently
blurted like a schoolboy. It was so conspicuously tense that he did
not heed her mother for the moment.

"If you are really anxious to see my father, he will be at home
tonight, or almost any time after that." It was as though he had been
to Ada some stranger meddlesome in personal matters, some tradesman,
a dealer come to buy a load of cattle, or to sell her father a
hay-loader.

"Unfortunate," he murmured.

His own ire rose.

"I had naturally hoped to see him, but, of course, I am not giving
up hope."

The two women said nothing. Richard, not to be drawn into
conventional insincerities of manner, much less of fact, resigned
himself almost to monosyllables until the end of the meal, and found
himself once more in the sitting-room with Mrs Lethen, whom he asked
if he might smoke. He had still to put in time until Ada should have
dispatched her duties. Talk as he might, the woman stared alternately
at the narcissi and at himself. Finally he was driven out to the
veranda, and after waiting there another half-hour in a mounting
uneasiness he walked over the lawn, already shaded pointedly along
the western side by the row of evergreens. Returning, he found a
stillness which seemed to bespeak a house deserted. At last he heard
a step within and, going to the door, addressed Mrs Lethen: would she
speak to Ada?

The very appearance of the girl, her quick step, look of concern,
was reassuring to his now obviously absurd fear, which had been
tantalizing, like that of a man who has lost a precious stone in the
grass. In the relief and gratitude of having her before him again, as
though she had escaped who knew what occult fate, he was made sure of
all that he had doubted, and her bearing seemed to tell him that,
instead of anything coming between them unaware, they were more
subtly linked than before.

"What is it?"

He looked at her reproachfully, with a smile that made light of
all he had been feeling, a smile which was to take away the
embarrassment she must share. "What should it be? Do you want me to
go away without seeing you?"

"Yes."

"But, Ada! What's the matter? What has come over you since I
came?" He saw his worst fears realized, and himself put against one
of those unforseeable psychic debacles as intangible as they are
overpowering, and as irremediable as insidious.

"I don't like the attitude you take toward my parents." Ada spoke
calmly.

"And I don't like the attitude they take toward you," he answered
in a flare of anger. "Nor to me either. I thought you could make
allowance for at least that."

"Your course then seems obvious." Her tone was unfathomable,
without feeling. She might have been torturing him, though he fancied
that if torturing herself she was delighting in the agony.

"My course is not obvious, but it will be definite, when I've
decided. I've had about enough of this."

She made no reply, and so uncertain had everything become that he
wondered whether in this he should see hope or forbearance which was
more strongly entrenched than active repugnance; she did not ask him
to go.

"What did your mother say in the kitchen?" he demanded. "What did
she say about me?"

She shook her head slowly, looking far away over the fields, to
the bright forest splotched with dark shade. There was no indecision
apparent in her air, yet to Richard's vexation it was as though she
did not know what she was doing, what she wanted. With an effort he
eschewed forcible expression of this feeling of his; in a situation
which seemed to him to demand the utmost care of reasonableness and
good sense, these qualities appeared to have deserted Ada Lethen, and
he was further angered by the abruptness with which he discovered
them measurably lost to himself; when he should have risen to an
occasion he was ready for any wild and final word or action.

"Let us go for a walk. You can't see things straight here, Ada; I
can explain. Come."

He had never seen her more beautiful, in poise of foot and head.
Her eyes were no longer sad, but bright with some enigma beyond his
conception, wide, unfathomable, maddening :

"No, thank you."

Fearing himself, he turned and was gone. He would not say never to
return to that house.

8

She had spoken, and he had pretended to accept what she said. He
could scarcely convince even himself that there was any use of
hoping, or of staying here. He could love her, with a love which
should have moved mountains, and blown trivial obstacles from them as
sand is swept across a beach, which should have caused happiness as
the air of a valley is changed, charged with sunlight. But as for
being effectively moved by these considerations, she might have been
a worn-out stump in such a valley, on such a beach. What balked him,
what finally enraged him, was not the feeling that she did not return
his love, or the difficulty of convincing her that she loved him, but
the fact that love could make so little difference. He had found
exaltation and in his darkest despair had taken consolation from
thinking that he was to learn what love alone could do, and he
thought he saw now that it could do nothing when circumstances and
temperaments conspired to cause a deadlock.

Nothing, nothing to be done, his mind repeated, and he did not
know how he put in the rest of the day, the afternoon and evening.
The Hymersons seemed to take it for granted that he should be
preoccupied, revisiting his old haunts. It was an effort to recall
the day of the week and month. No mail pursued him, he was cut off
from his old world, and no work could be undertaken; no reading
reminded him of either work or world.

As time passed he discovered that he was curiously thrust back
into a self, an existence which he had thought to forget with
boyhood. Sitting on a corn-cultivator in rough farm clothes, musing
at the end of a row, he admitted to himself that it was not the
circumstances of the present, his vacation, or any plan which held
him. Days were following each other, and though they were futile,
when he recalled their manifest summer beauty he lingered, postponed
deciding to go. Before long, tired of the feeling of a spectator
while every hour he became more a part of that former life, he had
volunteered to join the Hymersons in their farm work.

"Well, I kind of thought from the start you was sensible that way,
not scairt of getting your hands soiled," Carson told him. "We got an
extra team all right, unless you'd rather use the hoe."

Any kind of work which would be of use, Richard assured him, would
do, but he preferred a job of driving horses at first. Since no
change in the terms of lodging was mentioned, the farmer was well
satisfied, and disposed even to make a confidant of his guest, to
become intimate with him. As opportunity arose Carson told him of all
the wrongs he was suffering from his neighbours, particularly from Mr
Lethen; the misunderstanding of his motives when he told people how
things should and could be run; and prophecies of what would happen
where his advice was disregarded. And Richard would lean against the
dusty wall while evenings passed, interjecting the necessary
rejoinders, keeping his thoughts from wandering far. Or he helped
Carson with the milking, tying the cow's tail by its longest hair
about the animal's hind leg.

Arvin Hymerson had soon given up interest in the new dispensation,
baffled by the city man's apparent listlessness. He spent most
evenings in the village store, which was a source of audible
deprecation to his father. "He didn't use to be that way," the latter
declared with a puzzled smile. "He didn't use to be the kind to waste
time like that. I can't figure out what's got into him lately. He
don't seem to have no interest in home ties, somehow." Milne was only
surprised that Arvin had not been "this way" long ago. He was aware
of a sympathetic reaching-out from the young man, but his own
calloused and languid response did not add enough to serve as the
basis of companionship. It seemed to be as unnecessary that they
should be friends as that they should not be friends.

Usually silent and equable, the two were well matched to set off
the garrulity of Carson, who at noon would glance at yesterday's
paper, and start ridiculing the evolutionary theory, at the time
coming in for much publicity. Mrs Hymerson, by way of maintaining a
balance, sought to defend it with equal unreason: "Why, Pa, you know
there's negroes in Africa a lot like monkeys."

"Not me. When them ginks start talking about evolution to me, I
just got to say, "Look at Paul. Do they build better men than Paul
nowadays?'" Arvin smiled without seeking the attention of
Richard.

As day passed after day Milne knew himself deadened in them,
carefully following such routine as was discoverable, trying to work
out a programme which would account for all of his waking hours. He
rose early, though once at first Carson Hymerson deferentially waived
the right of calling him; harnessed the team, which had been curried
the night before; ate breakfast to the equally inane jocularity or
resentment of his host's talk, and the almost surprised taciturnity
of Mrs Hymerson and Arvin; hitched the team to the cultivator or the
mower, if he were not hoeing potatoes or pitching hay. Through the
long hours of morning and afternoon he attempted participation in the
ever-wonderfully oblivious pageantry of nature: sunlight, birds,
greying green of oats, stylized symmetry of waxing corn hills;
ripening amber ponds of wheat; in breezes for a damp brow, rain to
give a half-day's respite. He felt that he had been part of this for
ever.

Still a general enveloping indifference almost imposed upon him
the illusion that something did hold him there. It was to go farther,
coupled with the monotonous routine, until he found that to himself
he was at times that earlier uncouth boy, for whom nothing was sure,
not even his own hope or his smothered longing to get away into the
world. He scarcely remembered his late life in the city, his books,
his dealings with editors and publishers, film companies, and a
return there seemed inconceivable. Only with a start, perhaps lying
on a load of hay, through which the rumble and boom of the wagon and
the trotting horses smote his ears, would he return to Richard Milne,
and the courage once more to admit that what held him there would be
resolved this time or lost for ever. That alone was enough to make
him hesitate, and again he would be driven back by reluctance of the
test, never giving up the certainty that years might elapse, and his
former interests drop from him one after another, but he would go,
when he did go, with Ada Lethen, conclusively and for ever.

Her part in his life, he looked back and saw, had been of a strong
growth with his ambition and his bent for expression. And when those
had taken him to the city against his will, where he had slaved and
managed until his first books came out, and at the same time he had
obtained a foothold in the advertising field, he still thought of no
other woman. He was not long in discovering that his need was not
physical simply, and convinced of this he was prepared to allow
himself a latitude which he saw in the lives of people around him,
sure that he would never become engrossed. He had no leisure for
that, he told himself and once or twice a friend or two; and he felt
the need of no emancipation.

They would have smiled with irony had they known; freedom was
impossible for him. The first vantage place attained, he found
himself back, besieging her inaccessible ears. Nothing could exhaust
his patience, ever in imminence, as it seemed, of breaking. She had
become the core of his life, of all his intimate work, the concern of
his hours, so that he could not write an eloquent sentence, see a
fair morning, or step aside from danger, without her face. He could
never forget holding her in his arms, and it was with enormous
surprise that he would rouse himself in the seething flotsam of the
city.

His second return--with unregarded laurels--had been as vain as
the first, as all former time; and when writing and his sense of the
city had engulfed him again he declared that he could never go back.
Yet, with a finality of faith he would willingly have relegated to
poetry, he seemed thrust into a fate of unrelieved constancy. And,
since he could not bear the thought of flight, here he was
back--rebuffed as he had been before, wounded by a futility alien to
the remainder of his world.

Always her outward passivity had matched his patience. Yet, in a
tone of her voice, a look, he surprised all yearning and compunction
at his averted despair; in her unexpected pronouncement of his name
he had detached tiny glints, something more--like sight of a
goal--that seemed an index of her heart, that dreamed a little, while
it seemed to rest in sleep. Though Ada Lethen and the part she played
with him were the most familiar things to his mind, they formed its
greatest mystery-- more profound because part of the mystery was
himself.

Because he was part of the mystery he wondered at it the more. He
had two months before him in which it seemed he meant to do nothing
except indulge his sense of desperation and his sudden attack of
listlessness--though within him the purpose still held to achieve a
different finality. So he told himself, with a conscious effort to
rouse himself to that purpose once more. Time, after all, was
effecting changes in the one thing which had appeared changeless in
his life. He would not have settled here to this dumb inaction a few
years ago; he would have betaken himself to the city, anywhere away
from the scene of his repulse. The thought held frightening
possibilities. What was this business making of him? Unaccustomed,
his mind was fascinated by the question. There must have been changes
in him before this, which others had noticed, which he would begin to
see as time passed. He would become after all a man essentially
estranged from life, at least from the world, a romantic figure of
absurd incompleteness, an unadjusted person, if successful in art,
which does not demand normality, "a queer stick." All for what? "He
lost a woman," one-time friends would say.

These doubts of himself were not allayed when he thought of the
change in Ada Lethen beyond the sameness of circumstance and the
timelessness of her beauty. That would be stamped more finely with
the years; she would always be Ada, but these would make her in the
end just a woman, an "old maid" with a temper! Perhaps she would be
as nearly commonplace as that . . . but a denying flood, impressions
of her ways and charms, swept through his memory. She never would be
like other women. Yet there was some new recognition of the hardness
of life which she had been forced in the interval of his absence to
meet--or was forced now to consider. Perhaps in himself ... he had
not gone quite unscathed; he was beginning to know himself for a
different man in these quiet, memory-haunted fields. He roused and
started the horses down another row of corn.

But after consideration he rejected as self-flattery the thought
that her petulance had been a reflex of the emotion he desired in
her. Nor was it pique. It was love of her mother, of her whole past
life, which spoke when the mother came into clash with the man who
loved her. She felt smothered by circumstance, yes; she loved him,
perhaps; but that molten penetralia in her soul had never
crystallized to jewelled hardness shining through the ponderous,
iron-fretted doors, "portion and parcel of the dreadful past." She
might even know that she loved him; but if it had been a slow growth,
that love had never become the flame of her being, he thought, as his
rare love had been--to burn from her the coils of duty and pity and
half-forgotten hatred which bound her--to make her follow wherever he
should lead.

Yet he recalled moments. . . . Perhaps, perhaps there was a centre
of storm in her which, caught up with his own, in time would make, if
necessary, an upheaval in the lives of everyone about them, once it
had arisen. What held them back; what held him back? Until now he had
trusted to reasoning and delicacies of aspiration, longing and
intellectualized passion. Now futility whispered to him crudely. . .
. What means did other men take?

He would not admit that he was baffled; but every day saw him sunk
more deeply into an inertia distinct from his revived interest in
farm ways, moderately healthy spirits and appetite. He did not know
that he went about with the air of one sentenced irretrievably, yet
bearing up with thoroughbred reserve. His syndicate had allowed him
the holiday, and he assumed that there was no use in his going
elsewhere to spend it--in going anywhere now. Still, his condition
forbade inaction, and a part taken in the farmer's routine put him
back into that state of wilfully resigned hopeless longing of his
early years. So that after the first few days he felt that Ada Lethen
was miles away, out of reach, and each day added its weight to his
sense that he must not go to see her, to his inability to visualize
himself in such an attitude again.

Where was his appreciated success, his poise between introspection
and enterprise, which had made him the poetical novelist and one of
the most adept writers of mail-order advertising matter of his
generation? The years which had laid the foundation of that surety,
in health and resolute patience with hard circumstance, had returned
upon him, and he seemed a callow youth daunted by a now
unapproachable ideal, eating his heart out unwittingly before the
suddenly comprehended difficulty of life. He felt that he had never
worn anything but the overalls and shirt in which he was cultivating
corn.

The afternoon was sultry, but the breeze played with rasping corn
leaves throughout the dark field, and he rested his team beside the
road before another plunge among the dense growth. In a sudden
revelation of his impotence he sat with hands uplifted on the handles
of the cultivator as in a gesture of awe or beseeching, his head
lowered, eyes regarding the dusty grass of the headland as they had
overseen the passing hills of corn as he drove along them.

An automobile shot past with a flying streamer of dust, and the
people in the tonneau turned to look back at him. He smiled grimly as
they vanished down the worming river road, and in a second his
thoughts had returned upon him in a wave.

There was a soft clop-clop in the dust, and a buggy, faintly
rattling, approached. Beneath the open top sat a bronzed,
heavy-featured man and a slight, thin-clad boy. As Richard Milne
nodded he recognized Wallace Bender, a former neighbour.

"Hello, Dick, old boy!" the man shouted cordially. "Back on the
land, eh? Poetry played out, I suppose! Well, that's all right for a
side line," Bender continued in a confidential tone, wagging his
head, "but for a living you got to get down to farming; that's the
sure thing to stick to." The boy looked on, curious.

Richard laughed, and inquired regarding his old neighbour's
family, and when they had passed the time of day and he went on
cultivating he was surprised at the resentment which filled his
breast. It was as though he really concurred in Bender's appraisal.
The latter, after all, must have detected something in his bearing
which told of defeat. That it was not in the material battle was
Milne's disadvantage. But he was un-appeased, overtaken by a rage for
not having told him--the crabbed skinflint with his criterion of a
village mortgage-holder --how much in money he had made in the past
year. But the other would not have believed. And though Milne told
himself how little it mattered, his discomfort was unabated; until he
laughed at these new qualms of self-esteem, the general absurd
upheaval in himself. . . . Perhaps after all Ada Lethen had spoken
from an inner discord properly encouraging.

"Nothing will resolve doubt but action," Goethe had said it. He
would go and see Ada Lethen again. He would watch every ripple
between their minds; he would not lose control of his emotions this
time. But a sad private smile of incredulity met the thought, while a
symbolic rhythmic monotony of corn brushed his knees. His mouth
hardened. He would tell her once for all--but what was the use of
telling her anything? She was in possession of all the determining
factors which should move her. They did not suffice. Surely she
comprehended his point of view, perfectly sympathized with it,
supported it with her reason. In vain. Hers was an obsession with
duty. Let her have time to ponder the value of her loyalty, he
thought with quick savagery. Let her wait and think things out. But
his anger melted; he recalled that she had surely done so, surely had
had time. He was in a maze, helpless.

Yet a miracle was possible, and perhaps one was happening now. He
could hope that the passing of years would be compressed in sensation
into days, and she should see herself alone, prey to memories and the
squalid, tacit recriminations of her parents. And after that,
nothingness, more memories changed from a torture to her only solace.
Unless he lived still ... and found his way back.

He looked up when the horses stopped, and saw that he had come to
the end of the row, which from youthful habitude he had followed
accurately, without injury to a stalk of corn. He was still the prey
of conflicting emotions. He did not know what to do with himself.
Action--to fight. He should have liked to catch Bender again to
lecture him on his small-spiritedness . . . though he saw the
absurdity of accepting that man as a representative of the outer
world--of which a considerable portion would be wondering what had
become of him, and which had a regard for him sufficiently
favourable. He was allowing this matter to disturb him, was acting as
though nothing else existed but these few people, and as though there
were nothing to be done but to accept their point of view, their
limitations, and ineffectiveness. But something must happen. Things
could not go on in this way. For weeks he had felt an oppression
amounting at times to physical sensation.

There was his writing. But he expected the galley proofs of his
latest book in a couple of weeks; and he had permitted the lack of
typewriter and reference works to keep him from the beginning of even
the first draft of his next one. He had determined upon spending his
summer here, and he would do so, though every day put him further at
the mercy of the woman who had waited at the completion of every page
he had ever written, whose imagined wonder only the most intense
compacted inspiration could dim. Even the utterly sapped weariness of
mind and body after long creative effort hardly could make his
longing tolerable--inspiriting so that he could bend to more effort
again.

In a bright, fevered dream, with tangential flying wraiths of
hope, so had the years, the best years, gone. While each book became
more monumental than the last, he promised himself that the end of
each would mark his return, his finally triumphant return, his
bearing-off of that girl, never to see this confined place again. She
feared, she feared. But for him there was more security even in
flight, and any place in the world represented less of danger to
their love than this sheltered countryside in a remote part of
Canada.

Well, if ever she consented, there would be no delay, no
hesitation. How poignantly had every step been printed in his mind
long ago, so that whenever the suggestion came he busied himself
automatically with travellers' letters of credit, calculations of
railway and steamship lines, hotels. ... It was still impossible to
believe that they could rest there happily, even in the definitive
achievement of their love. Even if the old people--died.

No, they'd go away. They would be like children, happily lost
babes in the woods of this wondrous world. At last the grip upon him
would loosen: he would do none but his best creative work, a
flowering of unbelievable peace, of immense happiness. They would
look back upon these people, these fields in the way they should be
regarded; perhaps at last, by the operation of the irony in life,
they would seek out others like them. They would look back with
removed pity, even with the quality of affection one has for an old
dog dead long years ago. What was memory for but that? Yes, it was
possible, he smiled to himself bitterly, that they could yet see
something of benign-ance in even these tortured times....

Perhaps the fault lay all in himself, not--as he had always
felt--a strong man. Was it a lack of inclination over some deeper
lack? Didn't he want her badly enough? He had seen enough of men that
it profited him nothing to ask himself how others would have acted in
his circumstances. He might-- but his mind recoiled. He could not
connect such impulses with the defined image of Ada Lethen. And since
in the world he had had his opportunities and found no freedom, he
did not give much credence to the physical side of his love. It
seemed to be something deeper than his desires, than his will, like a
spell cast upon his mind while it had been forming. He could never
find freedom but in complete enslavement.

No, bitterly as he sought something to be blamed for all this,
even something in himself, he could not admit a fundamental lack of
passion, not even in Ada Lethen. He would rather indict this
oppressive atmosphere, this time and place, which smothered
spontaneity and natural virtue. Perhaps it really had ruined Ada? . .
. And reason told him at the same time that that was a recession to
adolescent standards, that there was as much freedom anywhere as one
could take. He invoked all the operose sophistries of his
generation.

"Get up there!" He slapped the horses savagely with the lines as
he turned them awkwardly round. He was doing little. Musing thus at
the ends of the field, he was scarcely vindicating the intention of
service to Hymerson which he had professed tacitly, whether or not
any were owing.

9

The horses raised heads and ears suddenly, and the young man,
looking too, saw a strange sight. The cornfield abutted on the line
fence between the Hymerson and Lethen places, and over the fence was
a gloom of trees, dark even now beyond a clearing minaretted by
mulleins. The shadowed oaks and maples seemed darkened thickly, and
even with their flourish of green somehow old and cool, wintry. And
before them, in the clearing among the slender spires of mullein,
stood a human figure.

Never since beginning work in this field had Milne's subconscious
alertness given way, as though some time, among the green, he would
descry the face of Ada Lethen, calling him. . . . Though nothing of
the sort could happen; she would see him from among the bush and
avoid him, unless ... he were to consider himself dreaming more
wildly than ever.

It was not she. The figure was strangely forlorn, as though
strayed there by chance from some indefinitely remote quarter, an
alien. It was hatless, with straggling grey hair, and advanced to him
almost as though subjectively cringing; suggesting the same motives
as a stray dog.

It was a man, who appeared to sidle around stumps and mulleins,
fallen logs, a huge ant-city, without noticing such obstacles, or
even Richard Milne, upon whom he was nevertheless intent as though
looking through him. The face was long and grey, with cleaving
perpendicular lines below, and level ones on the forehead
criss-crossed by the straggling hair. The figure was not so much
stooped as attenuated, slighter, so that it seemed at first as tall
as in former times.

Arrived at the fence, he leaned against the topmost rail as though
there was no danger that his weight would displace it, and gazed
earnestly with slate-grey eyes into the young man's face.

"Good day, Mr Lethen." Richard Milne spoke with a recollected sort
of serene severity. His hands twitched upon the levers of the
cultivator. The other did not reply, but gazed at the young man with
an almost entreating intentness. There was indeed something dog-like
in his haggard eyes, and his shoulders seemed twistedly sagging,
knobbled by heavy braces over the khaki shirt--store clothes,
machine-made, as those of other farmers seldom were. His dejection,
however, spoke an indifference to all details of the sort which gave
him an air of natural things and weathered objects, as though he had
never been beneath a roof within memory.

These matters, and the silence, gave Richard Milne an exasperation
which, as he was half-conscious, transposed the natural pity
following on a shock of recognition. His mood stiffened as he told
himself that everything was the old fellow's own fault, in part at
least. All the pent-up bitterness of years found vent in a
monosyllable, while he tugged at the lines as it were to turn the
team about:

"Well?"

"You are Alma Milne's son, aren't you?"

The gentle plangency of the tone, the words, surprised Richard
into his natural courteous consideration. He had almost forgotten
that he had been an orphan from early years, and had not thought ever
to be saluted in that manner again. Memories of childhood and a dark
country back of that, with weeping at a black winter funeral, stirred
him.

"Ada, my daughter, has told me about you," went on the tired
voice. "You've changed a little, or it seems so to me, since your
last visit." He meant the visit before last. They had not met,
Richard recalled, at the time of his last repulse, "I understand you
are to be congratulated on very creditable work. I'm glad," he added
simply, gazing about at the woods as though the scene of that work
had put him forward to thank the artist in its behalf. Richard almost
laughed with a mixture of incredulity, thwarted, hostility,
impatience, smothered pity.

"Thank you, Mr Lethen. What can I do for you?"

The brusqueness did not cause the old man to change attitude or
expression, yet he seemed to consult an inward necessity whether it
would force him on in the face of this hard unconcern.

"I hardly know how to put it," he ventured. "You are helping
Carson just now, and I don't want to be bearing tales against him
like this. But it seems like there's nothing else to be done. You
must have noticed his attitude. And I was wondering whether you
couldn't do anything to straighten things out."

"I might," agreed Milne readily, "if I could see in what way it
affected me." His feeling of the earlier afternoon had died down, but
he felt that he must play with the old man a little before descending
to that store of vehemence he had at times consciously been keeping
for such an opportunity as this occasion offered. Wrath distilled in
verbal form, since any other was out of the question. He had long
desired to tell Mr and Mrs Lethen his opinion of such a course as
they followed.

"It means everything," the old man was saying earnestly,
"everything to me, to get this straightened out. Surely there's a
way."

"Are you sure now that it wouldn't be necessary to make Carson
over for that, as well as, perhaps, yourself?" Richard enjoyed
abominably and delicately the brightening and the fall in the old
man's look.

"Of course, to come right down to it at once, it's us, our own
fault. You can blame us both. It's his way, and it's my being what I
am. But still there is no need of things coming to such a
pass...."

"Between neighbours, eh?" The tone was ironical almost to
bitterness, but the bitterness was half with Richard's own
perversity, for in that moment he recalled the way--romantic it
seemed to the real of the present--in which his writing had glossed
over such differences, with all the life of which they formed
part.

The old man glanced at him. "Yes, between neighbours. When we've
always got along. I may say, perfectly. When I first settled here as
a young man I used to compliment myself on having such good
neighbours. They were kind of backward about associating, but awfully
obliging, lend you anything you asked for. My father used to say it
was worth while living here just to have such good neighbours. Then
things changed little by little, the younger fellows came along, like
Carson, and somehow they seemed to see things differently. They kept
away more than ever. Not shy, they weren't. They seemed to take pride
in being independent, I suppose they called it."

"In other words, their fathers had to swallow your learning and
possibly your manner and means, and the sons' teeth are edged with an
inferiority complex. But to what pass is it that things, as you say,
are coming?"

"Things couldn't go much farther between neighbours," Mr Lethen
assured him again. "I had to go in to see my lawyer, the other day,
and he says it's nothing which should go to court."

Milne's impatience began to escape him. "Apparently you are sure
you want trouble, or you would not go to a lawyer. If matters have
gone to that stage, I'm sure I can't see there's anything but for you
to go ahead until you both get your fill of dissension, and the costs
connected with it--" He stopped abruptly. Words seemed to burn his
tongue for utterance, but he would hold his peace until the man had
shot his bolt. Then for an accounting, an understanding from first to
last.

"But you see I had to go to see my lawyer, since Hymerson has
filed a suit against me. The only thing now is to try to get it
settled out of court. It puzzles me--it puzzles me still. I can't see
what he should have against me."

"And, if you care to tell me, what is he suing you for?"

"For my land."

The old man spoke with such simplicity, as though expecting his
hearer to comprehend, that Milne wondered whether he had heard
correctly.

"Your land!" he exclaimed, surprised out of his posing. "What
title has Carson Hymerson to your land?"

"None that will stand in court. But that is another matter,
scarcely relevant. There's a mortgage--I've had one for
years--against the farm. He has got hold of the mortgage, and he has
always wanted the farm."

"And your lawyer tells you that his claim won't stand. That is
most fortunate for you." The sedate blandness of incomprehension was
part of his design; the unhappy are the most cruel of people.

Mr Lethen went on with a patience which ignored this. His brows
rose into wrinkles in his hair. "No, it only postpones my difficulty.
It's not necessary for him to win. The expense if I lose will be
enough to put me where I can't wiggle--as Carson himself told me. I
guess it's true enough. After the lawsuit, even if the court doesn't
give him judgement, holding the mortgage, he'll be able to sell me
out. He could now, if he only knew. I might as well tell him that."
The voice rose in bitterness. "But after the lawsuit there won't even
be public opinion to hinder him. That goes by the board when you get
into trouble. Then he can say that I'd do as much to him if I could,
that I tried, and so on. People that don't know me would believe it.
He has his standing as an officer in farmers' organizations and the
like."

"Well," intervened Milne in strong, deliberate tones, "that is not
as it may be assumed now. It would not appear safe to generalize
until after the event." He said this as gravely as though he more
than half meant it.

"I tell you, Mr Milne," the thin-faced man cried in sudden
passion, "it has got me going. I don't know what I am going to do.
There must be something, some way. I thought at first it's not
possible that such a thing could happen. But it appears to be
possible all right. I guess I'll have to admit I've been worrying
about it...." His manner made the young man think of Ada
Lethen--strangely, since never had there been this fire of instancy
in the speech of the daughter. And after there came her gentle smile,
in a way which appeared to expect that no one knew he had had any
other cause for worry throughout his life.

Richard Milne's hand stilled the lines upon the backs of his
horses, and he plunged into reflection. It was only after a moment
that he recalled the wisdom of not being hasty of belief in
everything told him. There should be limits to the recognized
irresponsibility of Carson. And it was strange that the old man
Lethen should appeal to him, to one so far--and in such manner--from
being a stranger. Perhaps it was an attempt at forestalling him. Was
it merely a grotesque manner of broaching acquaintanceship on the
part of this weird old man with the haunted eyes? Yes, those eyes had
seen trouble enough in this life, Milne knew, more than is usually
given in the lot of man. More, it occurred to him, strangely, than
his own were likely to see; his own trouble seemed temporary and
simple. But perhaps those eyes had learned cunning.

These things flashed through his mind without leaving an impress
or meeting with question or the certainty of assent. His thoughts
became impersonal, and thence he inclined to pity, to mercy, or at
least the putting aside of his own quarrel with this unhappy man who
obviously was speaking the truth. In hurried tones, automatically, he
began reassuring him.

"No, of course, there's no use worrying about it. Carson would
make the most of that." He only needed to speak to reveal the
direction of his sympathy now. At once there was a brightening
appreciation in Mr Lethen's manner. "Instead, everything should be
done to get at the root of the trouble.... Does Arvin know about
it?"

"Yes, but that was in the early part. He kind of laughed when I
brought it up, and said that his father had queer notions --trying to
hush it up as though it didn't amount to anything. He said his father
wouldn't really sue when it came to the point. I think Arvin means
well.... But he's got into the way of giving way to everything his
father says."

"Yes. No matter how absurd. And what about Carson himself? Have
you actually spoken to him directly about the matter recently?"

An embarrassing hesitancy seemed to shape an answer otherwise in
the same tones of melancholy. "Just half an hour ago, or less. He was
in his oats field pulling mustard when I went to see whether we
couldn't come to some understanding. He didn't want to listen to me
at all," said the old man with a sheepish smile. "Finally, I told him
I didn't think it would pay to go ahead; I guessed the world hadn't
got so bad but what the public opinion would make it hot for him.
Then he did get started! He said--why, he went right up in the air,
and talked so fast you couldn't hear yourself think. I'd see how much
people thought of me, he said. They'd forgotten I was alive, long
ago. Years ago, he said, I used to strut around like a lord. We'd see
the way public opinion regarded me! Why, I didn't deserve to own a
farm, the way I go on. That's what makes it right for him to do me
out of my property. He wouldn't let me tell him that though; he was
going at such a rate that one couldn't hear himself think. The things
he didn't think up weren't very many! There's no use trying to repeat
them all." Mr Lethen winced. "And perhaps he's right, and people are
really indifferent. A new generation. ... I am a back number. What he
told me were private affairs which couldn't concern him at
all--personal matters, you understand. Then he wound up by telling me
he'd do his worst; he'd put me on the road, bag and baggage, if I
tried to stop him. Unusual logic. They'd been easy with me on the
mortgage, he said, and as for that it's true some of these hard years
I've only been able to pay the interest. But now he wants to make
that right by taking the farm away from me. He put that quite
plainly, without even saying, 'If you don't pay me what you owe* me.'
He thinks there's no likelihood of that. He thinks I can't, and he'll
just take it. Oh, I never saw such a man!"

The listener had been lost in thought while the voice went on,
reaching him almost unwittingly. It was to him as if the ghost of
some lost part of himself were speaking. An angleworm twisted in a
shiny clod of the freshly turned earth, its two halves separate. He
looked up, as though coming to himself, but without words, and Mr
Lethen lifted his arms from the rail, as though about to turn
away.

"Well, I'm sorry to have stopped you this way. If Carson notices
it won't make things any better. ... I hope you won't think I stop
anybody like this and pour out a tale of woe. It seemed to me that I
knew you, after knowing your people. Just the same it does a man good
to talk about his troubles, you know...."

"Of course," Richard Milne murmured. "It's an easy service."

"But not a small one. . . . And how have things been going with
you since you left this part of the country?"

The old man obviously wanted to make conversation, as though
unwillingly but inevitably impelled toward further confidences. Or
perhaps to delay as long as possible going away, and abandonment to
his own misgiving and despair, his solitude. He talked and made mild
replies about the weather and the crops, with a look of solicitude
about his dimmed green-grey eyes, his fallen face, and grey temples,
stringy grey moustache. Yet it was all as though this were an old
ritual with which he had many times cajoled despair, tried to warm
his heart, made cold by a contact of most searching and intimate
hatred. Perhaps alone with Ada Lethen he had talked thus, while she
listened with a still look, gazing across the country, replying with
far-off echoes of sympathy. ... He was like a grey, unhappy little
boy, this withered man.

Richard made sympathetic interjections, and at length, without
transition, he said, almost in spite of himself, "I'll see what I can
do, Mr Lethen. I'm sorry more than I can tell you to see such
troubles here. I'll probably see you, or let you know what can be
done. Don't worry in the meantime. Such things as he talks about
don't very often really come to pass, fortunately. And I'm sure not
this time if I can help it." Richard fixed his dark eyes upon the
other, while his firm voice with continuity deepened, the voice of
one who knew his mind, and in most cases was accustomed to acting
accordingly.

The old man's eyes filled with tears. "I hope not. I'll-- hope
not. You don't know what it would mean. Well!" he cried desperately.
"It simply can't happen, that's all. Not to me." His desperation
spoke a word which his trembling lips tried to conceal. No, he would
not live. Mrs Lethen would never know before. ... He turned away and
was gone, with braced steps twisting across the clearing toward the
sound of cowbells.

Richard Milne turned his team about, lowered the levers of the
cultivator, and took his way back along another row of corn. The
trouble, he recognized, was real enough, if only a peril in the old
man's imagination. For as many years as he had dwelt in his
mortifications he was inured to them, and he would not have come with
this appeal to a comparative stranger unless by an actual compulsion.
The security of a lifetime on one plane was upset, and, since on the
side of his relation with his wife he lived in chaos, he would seem
to be left with nothing to which he could hold.

Richard Milne's mood softened to pity, passed through reasoning to
a hardened resolve to get at the bottom of the affair, to have it out
with Carson Hymerson.

The latter had treated him lately with an insistent deference,
irritating because it was dictated by the consciousness of possessing
the services of a hired man without paying him wages. In spite of the
contempt beneath for one so lax, this attitude was contrasted with
the indifferently veiled acrimony he accorded his son. Carson's
conscience, galvanized within him by thousands of such little
calculations (he felt roughly like a big boy taking candy from a
kid), made him muster contempt for people who would so willingly
serve his needs.

The two young men were linked in this. He felt that he was
overreaching both. Milne recalled his speech to a neighbour, who
complained of the fiightiness of hired help. "My boys stay right by
me!" Then Carson looked around to see whether Milne, splitting wood
at the dooryard, had heard--almost hopefully.

Even his humour did not seem winning. One rainy day they hauled
manure, burnt dry and acid-white. The load steamed rankly. "This'll
loosen up your colds!" Carson's thick, short mouth was pursed.

The horses reached the rail line-fence again, the rustling through
the corn ceased, and there was a cry from just before him. For a
moment he could see nothing, then Ada came into view between the
heads of the horses. Her face seemed blanched, with surprise
reflected from his own face, he thought at first. She almost ran
toward him. Haste increased her natural, long-limbed grace.

"Did you see my father?" she gasped. "Quick, tell me, did you see
him?"

Dread surmise constricted him. "Why, Ada!" His voice made it seem
as though he spoke to remind both himself and her that she was that
Ada Lethen of his world. But her distraught, listening face turned to
him made him reply.

"Yes, your father was here not half an hour ago. Surely nothing's
happened--"

"Thank God! No, perhaps not." She was turning away, as it were
automatically, on the satisfactory reply to her burning anxiety, then
glanced at him again. "Oh, I was afraid 1"

"But, Ada! Tell me--" He had leaped from the cultivator and was
leaning over the fence.

"It would take too long--too long a story, and I must go and look
for him."

"He was here, and told me about it. Carson Hymerson says he is
going to--"

"Put us on the road! Yes. He has been so subdued of late, and I
wondered what it could be--as if he hadn't enough to bear already!"
Her voice broke. "And today he told me, and something about the
way--something in his manner--I began to think about it this
afternoon, and I came out to talk it over with him, I looked all over
the farm and I can't find him. You're sure then? Which way did he
go?" Uncertainty gathered on her brow again.

"Quite sure. He told me all the details, and what Carson said. It
seemed to relieve his mind to a certain degree. About half an hour
ago he left me, right here, going into the bush again. I promised him
that I would see Carson and find out what could be done. Ada! Please
believe me, there's nothing happened, nothing can happen. I'll see
that the business is straightened out."

"Oh, Richard! You can?" She leaned weakly against the fence. His
name on her lips quickened him. "I can't seem to get over my foolish
fright!" Her slender hand pressed her heart.

With a smooth movement, as though premonitory of one on his part,
she had started away almost before he knew. Her swift, limber steps
went over the close-bitten grassy knolls, among the ant hills and
mulleins, into the bush. He formed his lips to call her, then
stopped, looking after her vanishing form, and opened his mouth
again.

"Ada!" He was on the ground, beside the cultivator. "Wait!"

She turned, and he made for the fence, forgetful of'the team which
might run away.

"No, no!"

So fierce an impulsion of will was in her voice, in her bearing as
she looked at him, that he stopped, his mind full of their last
parting. As she vanished he called again.

In a fever of haste he turned to the cultivator and the team. In
the middle of the field the team shied, and a figure emerged from the
rustling corn, the oldest Burnstile boy, in clothes too large, his
tow head bare, his small blue eyes grave, "Hello, Mr Milne!" he
cried. Milne urged the team on automatically as he returned the
salutation. "I've been looking for Mr Lethen's hat."

"Your own hat you mean, don't you, Tom?" Perhaps it had been a
gift.

"No, Mr Lethen's. You know old man Lethen, don't you? Well, I was
in the bush," the boy shouted shrilly, following in the corn row,
"and I seen him and old Carson over in the field. They didn't know I
was seeing them, and they were going it hot and heavy. Fin'lly
Hymerson up and hits old man Lethen--"

"What?"

"Hits him, knocks him for a row. Knocks his hat off. Pretty soon
old man Lethen comes to his own bush where I was, and he tells me
he's lost his hat coming by Carson's field, and wanted me to go look
for it."

"Here," said Milne, never stopping the horses, pulling out a
quarter. "Go and find the hat and take it to Mr Lethen." He trotted
the outfit into the lane, and dust rose from the wheels of the
cultivator as he jogged the heavy horses.

When he reached the barn, Carson Hymerson was coming out of the
stable door with a sigmoid smile on his face, which vanished to
reappear almost as quickly.

"Well, you're late a little; maybe five minutes after six. Was
that the reason you trotted the horses? I suppose you were trying to
make up for the time you lost. I seen you talking to that old loafin'
blatherskite. You'd think he'd have more shame than to lean on the
fence and talk an hour, taking up people's time. If it was me--"

The man had been tying up the lines of the team while he poured
out an easy stream of words. Now he came to their heads at the same
time as Milne came from the other side. Richard looked at him
steadily. He stopped, confused, but unable to avoid that intense
gaze.

"Is what he said true?" The voice was like the blow of an
axe-head.

"True," grumbled the other. "How do I know what the old
blatherer's been saying?"

Lifted on a wave of fury, Richard forgot everything. He did not
know the roaring sound of his own voice,

"You know very well what he was saying; you needn't look at me in
that hangdog manner. I want to know! Is it true you are going to
foreclose his mortgage?"

Carson shrank away. "My own's my own, and I'll do what I please
with it," he mumbled.

"You'd better answer me!" Richard's voice had risen to a bellow of
pure rage which no action could ever match. "Look here. You go ahead
with your doings; get the sheriff out here. Put this man off his farm
if you can. I want you to understand that at the first step I'm
going to get the best lawyer money can hire, and fight it to
the last. You think a lawsuit will ruin Lethen. Well, we'll see how
that works on you. I'll put everything behind this thing, if
necessary. My signature is good for quite as much as you can get
together, understand that. Meanwhile!"

Carson threw up an arm, but too late. Richard Milne's right fist
had knocked him, half-turning, to the ground six feet away.

"Little cur! ... Foretaste... "

Richard muttered, looking at Carson's removal almost with
astonishment. His arm felt foreign to him, as he strode over the
plank walk to the house.

A smell of burnt pepper on the frying eggs greeted him. Lemon
spots from level sunlight on the walls, as he spoke to the farmer's
wife without looking at her.

"Mrs Hymerson, I wish you would make out my bill. I won't be
staying with you any further. Can you have it ready when I come
down?"

Upstairs in his room he packed with collected haste, astonished
afresh at the meagreness of the effects with which he had spent all
this time. There was a murmur of voices outside, then a shout as the
man entered and found him absent.

"I won't have the skunk in my house. You tell him his time's come,
or I will. Think I'm going to have such a--" The voice went on.

Milne took three heavy steps across his floor, which was above the
kitchen, and smiled at the sudden silence.

When he came down the farmer was not in the room. There were tears
in Mrs Hymerson's eyes and she could scarcely face him, but she
half-heartedly insisted that he remain for the meal.

"I'm sorry that this had to happen, Mrs Hymerson," he said
finally. He unfolded a yellow bill from his small roll. "I would like
to thank you for your kindness in taking me in. And I think I'd
better tell you that our trouble is that Mr Hymerson has decided to
foreclose the mortgage on the Lethen place. Of course, I shall not
allow that to happen. I don't say that it will not be met, but if he
becomes too hasty I am sure that there will be no hesitancy in
fighting the case." He turned from the kitchen door, raising his
hat.

"Good-bye, Mr Milne. You mustn't think too hardly of us on account
of this."

"Indeed not. It probably will blow over. But I think that under
the circumstances I'd better not stay. Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

Arvin Hymerson confronted him in the yard. For a moment the two
eyed each other, Milne still holding his club bag. The young farmer
spoke non-committally.

"I ought to lick you if what my father says is true."

"Well," said Milne with a drawl and a gleam, "if that is the way
you look at it, I had better tell you beforehand, while I think of
it, that I have nothing against you, Arvin. Later it might slip my
mind. Probably what your father told you is true as far as it goes."
The other looked at him more doubtfully. "I call it mighty strange
actions on the part of your father. He has been strange to all that I
knew of him, ever since I came here. I can't make him out."

"Yes," spoke Arvin with sorrowful quietness. "I don't understand
myself. It didn't use to be so bad. Or perhaps I notice more. ... I
think he gets more like he was as a boy, though he's not so terribly
old, either. He was the youngest and they used to pick on him, he
told me...."

The young man hesitated, unwilling to go on with what might appear
a justification. A flash of Milne's never-remote literary interest
came to the surface, to be quelled in brusque-ness. He held out his
hand, which the other grasped.

"I can see well enough what's the matter with him. Well-known
psychological type. Good-bye."

A thrill of elation under his thoughts, Milne turned on his heel
and walked down the lane to the road.

Then he recalled his parting with Ada Lethen.

10

A clinking of dishes and cutlery told Milne that the Burnstile
family was at supper when he crossed their lawn and stepped on the
veranda in the mellow, mote-filled sunlight. Bill, the father, in
shirt sleeves, called over the head of the girl who had come to open
the screen door.

"Just in time. Come in." He appeared unsurprised. There were
smiles on the faces of the children, as though at an old accustomed
jocosity.

"Sit down. I was telling them," Bill continued, "about Devil John
Jones. Do you mind him? He used to be around-- perhaps you wouldn't
see so much of him as us older fellows. Anyway, one day he came to
Dad and wanted to sell him a pig. Well, the pig looked kind of runty,
and my father wasn't particular about it, but he agreed to keep it a
few days anyway, since Devil John was bound to unload the brute right
there and then. You see, if he didn't buy, and sent it back, old John
would be ahead that much feed." Here Johnny choked with laughter,
and, glancing at him with enjoyment, Bill continued the drawling
narrative.

"Well, they puts Mr Pig into a pen alone, and Dad feeds him right
away, puts a big tubful of swill into the trough in front of him. Old
John stayed around quite a while, chewing the fat and dickering for
some other head of stock, and then they went back after a while and
took another look at the pig again. Every bit of that swill was gone.
Pig had ate it all. Well, Dad ups and reaches into the pen, takes
that pig by the ears and tail, and hoists him out of the pen and into
the tub that had held the swill. And that doggone pig wouldn't fill
that tub! Well, sir, that was enough for my father. He said he didn't
want anything more to do with an animal like that, that ate more than
his own size in one meal. Had your supper. Richard?"

"Well, no--"

Milne's voice held a reserve scarcely adjusted to the scene before
him. In this there was a comforting familiarity which seemed to
delete the emotions of the past days and at once to bring into focus
a homely reality.

"Sit in here then."

Mrs Burnstile, whom he had met but once, seconded the invitation,
as she rose and brought extra dishes to the table. Part of the
children got up and circulated about the room, while some of them
remained seated. He was served with soft, warm fried potatoes and
cold ham, tea, and apple sauce and cake.

After supper Richard accompanied Bill to his chores at the barn.
His suitcase on the veranda reminded him of the need of explanation,
and he asked whether he might spend a few weeks there. He had a sense
that the other regarded this as almost unnecessary form, so casually
had he been received; and he felt so fully that he had been there a
long time that it seemed superfluous to mention an indefinite
stay.

Bill nodded. "Fall out with Carson? I kind of thought it would
come. If you think you can enjoy your vacation here amongst my tribe,
you're perfectly welcome."

Richard explained that he might like occasionally to take some
exercise in the fields, if he could be of use, but that he didn't
want any dependence to be placed upon his availability. In fact, as
though he had held a thankless, altruistic purpose of service to
Carson Hymerson, he was inclined to repudiate such an
intention altogether now. He felt the need of asserting independence.
He would pay his way and maintain strictly the aloofness of a summer
boarder. But if people showed themselves congenial he was prepared to
be accommodating. This feeling probably arose from his sense of some
appearance of the ridiculous in his obstinacy, his sticking to this
countryside, after Ada Lethen had attempted definitely to break with
him, and he had been unable to get on with his host.

In truth he was more or less dazed, and the celerity and ease with
which upsetting things happened seemed prophetic of still more
catastrophic events in the future. He had a sense of fatality and
sometimes his conjectures regarding the outcome made him determine
that his resolve, or his tendency, to proceed slowly was justified.
It had required only the events of the last few days to make him
doubt his position and, almost, his feelings. Ada Lethen--was it in
her or his engrossed dream that she had appeared to him that
afternoon?

Bill agreed briefly to his proposal. Would his wife favour it?
Richard solved the problem by his bearing, his interest in the
children, and consciously by proffering to Mrs Burnstile the amount
of two weeks' board in advance.

Long before those days had passed he felt that he knew the healing
of change and time in that gregarious family, and the partaken
freedom of young growing things about him. He was diverted, even
absorbed, by the ceaseless interplay and careless activity of the
children; and before long he was part of it, in the confidence the
boys and girls had for him.

The kids would bother him, Bill Burnstile had prophesied, and
there was not long a doubt of this, with the insistence of the boys
in escorting nearly all of his daytime walks. While his mind bent
over pondered thoughts his eyes would follow their antics, or he
would return wholly to listen to their absurd talk.

They seemed almost to have accepted as a duty the part of
entertainers, and wrestled, chased, and bantered each other
remorselessly and without weariness. They were rewarded for hours if
Richard Milne burst into an involuntary laugh when Bill and Tom
wrestled themselves into weird shapes, or, becoming angry, fought
with clods of earth from behind trees until they laughed at
themselves. And they had always a marvellous tale of their immediate
experience they must share.

"Mr Milne," the vivacious red Bill chattered. "Mr Milne, you know
that rat I had?" Richard recalled a mouse they had caught in a screen
trap, nearly dead, with a hole in its side.

"Mine, it was," claimed the older Tom, looking up from his feet,
which were pawing the soft turf. Johnnie, his soft, dark eyes
gleaming, looked shyly with understanding from them to the man.
Bill's tones rose.

"Yours it was not I Well, I had it. You know? I killed him and he
jumped away."

"And how did you kill him?" Richard asked.

"Jumped on him, of course. Both heels." When Bill demonstrated,
Johnnie squealed, jumping likewise. "And he jumped." Bill adapted a
wiggling motion of the hand to the word. "And jumped! And I killed
him and he jumped I"

Slow-witted Tom wanted to know, literally, though he had been
present at the execution, how the rat could jump after he had been
killed.

"Easy."

"Yeah, I bet you couldn't if you was killed."

"Oh, yes, I could. I'd jump around like a chicken without a
head."

Though the others got into most of the mischief, Johnnie seemed to
enjoy the greatest zest in it, adding that of the spectator to the
part he played. Their fights were transitory, fierce, and soon
forgotten, but Bill was usually the aggressor. His older brother was
half afraid of him; but Johnnie, when once in a while he was fully
roused, could take his own part with him or the growthy, open-mouthed
Tom.

The practically complete irresponsibility of their life was like a
fresh revelation to Milne, who enjoyed it for them more fully than
they did. Their father seemed to allow them all freedom, but the
truth was that he forgot them until some of the stock broke out and
had to be herded in by "all hands," or some chore had to be left to
them when he went with his team to the field. They were impelled by
projects and curiosity embracing the whole extent of farm routine and
phenomena. They could find amusement in tumbling down a strawstack,
hissing the gander, clinging to the tail of a gambolling calf,
building what they called a "suspension bridge" over a ditch by means
of ropes, dog-chains, and the stakes from a corn planter. Or they
were diverted by merely wandering about the fields and lanes.

The weather became rainy, but they were not deterred. They liked
to find places, such as the road or the lane, where the fine,
paste-like mud would squelch through their toes; and, bursting into
shouts, they commenced a race "on a heavy track," as Bill explained,
while they slipped, fell, and rose with a mass of mud smeared over
their clothes.

Their mother was a red-headed, blue-eyed Scotch woman of rapid
tongue and a mind of her own, which she exercised but little except
when her inclinations were crossed. Bill Burn-stile had run across
her in the West, and, since she seemed a capable sort of woman for a
housekeeper, and a good sport, he had married her. He had liked her
smartness, but now she appeared to have become somewhat lackadaisical
in her attitude toward life. She paid perfunctory attention to the
children, and, beyond a casual word now and then to the effect that
they were not to "bother Mr Milne," she betrayed little interest in
preventing them from conducting themselves as they pleased.

This easy-going character showed itself in her housework as well,
and if she had been inclined toward rationalization, she might have
held that it manifested part of her equipment for self-preservation.
For if she had tried alone to take care of the house and every need
of her family, she would have been run to death. And rest was one of
the things to which she was normally inclined. She was healthy,
usually content, and so were the children, with access to the pantry
whenever they cared for "a piece," and without inhibitions
regarding manners or the care of furnishing or their clothes.

She customarily took the mornings for cooking, churning, or
sweeping, care of the poultry; some afternoons for mending, and much
time for an incidental and almost unconscious idleness, in which she
read magazines, arranged her hair, or talked to her girls, to the
neighbours by telephone, or slept.

The girls themselves were three--Alice, wistful, nervous,
emphatic, fifteen, who was to start to high school in the coming
autumn; Ellen, thirteen and older than any of the boys, a thin, pale,
little thing with blue eyes, gentle voice, and a determined mouth;
and Mary, younger than Johnnie, with deep gold hair uncommon for a
child so young, blue-grey eyes, merry lips never still and usually
moistened with fruit.

Richard Milne spent much of his day in wandering about the
country, chatting over fences with old neighbours and new, drinking
in impressions of the life he had known, or making a vague eifort to
impose exterior circumstances upon his attention, to let them
supersede his inner conflict. But mostly he was unable to decide why
he should make an eifort toward anything. At first he had thought of
going directly, not to Ada Lethen, but to her parents. Perhaps they
could come to an understanding which would alter the whole situation.
They did not realize, surely, what they were doing to Ada Lethen,
what they had done. If they retained any natural affection they could
be made to see. If they did not.... He pictured himself standing
between the aging man and woman, impelling them to speak, to know
each other.... But he could not decide whether this was a wise thing
to do, and, particularly because he desired to make a scene of that
sort on account of the acrimony engendered in him during the last few
weeks, he was reluctant to trust himself in such a situation. Or if
he could trust himself, he could not trust unforeseeable factors in
the predicament. Did he not have good reason? He could not know what
Ada Lethen would do, in any case.

Yet, as he had always told himself, she had common sense; she had
restraint, or she should not have been where she was for the reasons
for which she was there. He had told himself as an uncompromising
realist that she had, she must possess, faults. Yet he could not
label them. He saw excuses, reasons for the delinquencies, failings
which annoyed him most, and these reasons in the sadness of her life
brought him back to the important, the moving, the all-important fact
which animated his whole interest: he loved her. If he had not, or
loved her less, anything might have been possible, everything might
have been risked.

A distrust of obvious and melodramatic courses had returned upon
him, so that he marvelled at what he had already done. He had
promised her father his help in a lawsuit, if it should transpire
that such help was needed. He had knocked Carson Hymerson down, on
the other hand, and ran the risk of being hauled before the local
magistrate on the charge of assault. He should have been prepared for
any developments, and should have been ready, now that the ice was
broken, to adopt a course of action that would get him. what he
wanted. Yet he was held back. If he sought the Lethens out, with his
present feelings to all three, he would probably secure the enmity of
two at least, and Ada one of them. No, he would wait until he saw
clearly his course.

He was capable of that, though at moments the country was a prison
cell up and down which he walked. He would wait, and if nothing came
of the difficulty with Hymerson, the way would seem clearer, or at
least no less simple, if that were an advantage, than it had always
been. If the dispute came to actual court proceedings, the matter
would be complicated infinitely, and perhaps against his will he
would be forced into a part which would win, and certainly would
earn, the favour of the Lethens. What a subject it would be for local
talk!

Again, if the case were lost and they were put off the farm, Ada
would refuse to leave the old people, and her gratitude would be no
more than an embarrassing burden. He shuddered. Won, still more
embarrassing would be the regard of the parents, if they showed
any--fortified, not shaken from their old positions. They might even
recognize his right to marry Ada, give their consent, and he might
find himself bound to continue assistance, remaining with Ada in this
place. His old resentment against the unhappy couple returned,
mingled with a perverse pride. He would not flatter them with his
help; he would conquer them without their knowing it. And he would
prefer that their true colours should be revealed to Ada --if she
could recognize them. With all his dislike for both Mr and Mrs
Lethen, which blurred their images directly they were removed from
his presence, he could not quite assure himself that they would show
just the degree of obtuse acrimony, the stupid resentment, which
might be calculated to make Ada see them as they appeared to
himself.

Meanwhile he was wise to stay away, in a life of the casual
summer-holiday boarding type which he had always scorned. Carson, he
knew, believed his threat of taking part in any proceedings, and if
he did assume bravado enough to begin, could soon be brought to time.
And Mr Lethen would still not be tempted to venture into hostilities
needlessly, as he might had Richard continued to reassure him. But
his story might not have contained the whole truth. Perhaps, Milne's
more detached judgement told him, it would prove to be six of one and
half a dozen of the other, so that right and wrong would prove
indistinguishable, in the commonly wearisome and costly manner.

Divided in mind, even whilst almost obsessed, Richard found no
respite. At times he was disgusted with himself. What should he have
to do with such people? It seemed to him at times that he had placed
himself at the mercy of the unreason of two probably inexcusable and
needlessly contentious peasants. Of course, he was not compelled to
have anything to do with them. No matter what happened, he could
refuse to stir, and even Ada scarcely could blame him.

But he knew only too well that he would feel obliged to redeem his
words, or at least do his best to discover where the rights or wrongs
of the matter lay. For once having begun any enterprise, he was
fatally constituted to follow it through to finality. Otherwise he
should have been far away at that moment.

Richard Milne's dissatisfaction had spread to include all things
without and within him; no longer was he simply rankling with the
irony of the thwarted male. Every move he made drew him further into
an irrelevant maze. He wondered whether it would not be just as wise
to resort to extreme measures-- elope with Ada Lethen, carry her off
if necessary, or take himself away for ever. Yet, as he kept telling
himself, he had only to think of the woman herself to know the
futility of any course which might occur to him. It seemed that the
perfections with which she had been endowed in his mind made part of
her inaccessibility, so that he could not "think success," in the
locution of inspired commerce.

Yet it would have been the logical outcome of his earlier mood,
intensified by its own momentum, or aggravated by any mere
catastrophe, to take drastic measures. The night of that very day he
had come to conclusions with Carson he had felt with elation that
anything was possible. But that was past. He could do nothing,
really, not even think effectually--but wait, and that not patiently.
He was inclined to blame his own mind and hers, intricate mechanisms
constructed for purposes futile, pathetically ridiculous and
grandiose.

11

The bewitched summer was passing, to the senses imperceptibly, and
generally to his dissatisfaction. It seemed to typify that rural
dilatoriness which doubtless kept Carson Hymerson from taking the
steps he had threatened in his lawsuit with Lethen; and it gave no
hope of coming certainty, no illusion of progression or rumour of
hope.

In the morning Richard Milne, after breakfast with the family and
automatically meticulous care in grooming, walked alone to the front
gate, along the road to the big gate before the barn on the edge of
the ridge; he looked at the stock in the yard, perhaps fastened one
end of the neck yoke when Bill Burnstile was hitching his team for
the morning's work in the field. The young man surveyed the crops,
variegated squares, from the slope, and descended into the orchard
back of the house before completion of what the children called going
"round the block," and returned to the veranda.

There were green small winter apples in the orchard, and harvest
apples already becoming yellow. There were spots of deep shade. He
always expected his reveries to be broken into by sight or sound of
one or more of the children hiding behind the reddish trunks, which
had been rubbed smooth by the grazing animals. Any of them might be
lurking in the higher grass or in the thick, poorly pruned limbs of
the trees themselves. Little Mary seemed to haunt the place, not
regarding the presence or absence of the others; and the child's
capabilities in climbing and hiding were part of an abiding mystery.
Richard offered to lift her down from a bough above seven feet of
smooth trunk, but she laughed and went on with her talking. She
talked apparently as much for herself as for any hearer. It was not
the usual child's fairy stories, concerned with princes, angels,
dollies, and posies, but as he heard her breathless voice in the
distance, "an' ... an'... an'...", he knew that she was embroidering
some stupid literal circumstance or object in her little world.

Passing that way again, tired of himself and the idle depression
of his mind, the man would stop and listen.

"Johnnie, he went way up in the tree and lookeded in the
robins' nest, an' robin pecked 'is hand, an' 'e corned down quick,
an'--Mr Milne, Mr Milne!"

"Well, our cat climbed right up in your apple tree." Her gold hair
gleaming in the spots of sunlight, her ruddy face aglow, she
laughed.

"Richard! Richard! One old hen, she died, and Billy-- Billy took
her babies. Billy looks after them now." She laughed. "If Ada Lethen
had apples on her trees, and the robins and the crows pecked them
off, I'd be glad! If they fell on the ground Aw'd be glad! Aw'd be
glad i" Without animus she laughed at her own irresistible
humour, repeating her saying, concluding with an effect of rhetoric
and almost evangelical beatification, "Aw'd be glad!" She laughed
with an Oriental, steady uprightness of countenance.

"There was a man here, and another man, and Johnnie liked the
other man, and the other man gave him a nickel, and-- Do you know
what I say and Ellen says when Mamma gives us supper? Fankoo. Fankoo,
we says."

Mary interrupted herself to search her mind for something more
marvellous to add. "Did any of the trees in this orchard blow down in
the storm? Yes, they did. Look over there at that limb blown down
right to the ground."

Stormy weather made no difference apparently to the children, who
might be found in the orchard, playing in the barn, or anywhere but
in the house. Sometimes, at meals or when otherwise they came under
the eye of their father, he ordered them to keep in out of the
rain.

There were many such days. The woods and fields became soggy and
wet, the long-desired rains of spring belatedly arrived to confound
summer prospects. In spite of this Richard Milne had given up taking
his walk along the clean, gravelled highway, in a vain determination
to avoid even physical approach to the Lethens.

The days were warm, even during the heaviest rains, the sun bright
and ardent immediately after. Too bright, too warm, Bill Burnstile
claimed, after the first showers. The ground would cake in the dry
time to follow. But it was rain and again more rain that followed.
The farmers, after short space of sun in the late afternoon, went to
bed certain that another day would let them on the land, which sorely
needed cultivating among the matted weeds of the corn and rank
tobacco; the wheat must be cut, rain or no rain, since it would
certainly be lost if it were left.

And through the night of their heavy slumbers the rain would fall,
softly at first upon the low roofs, then steadily half the night, in
the serene and fragrant dark, with little breezes, and the earth
would drink surely to satiety. In the morning the soil would appear
as it had the morning previous, but it would take two more days to
dry, if another shower did not follow. . . Meanwhile the crops were
being smothered with weeds, the grain was beaten to the ground, in
some cases left until overripe and then lodged and shelled by
storm.

Something in this rhythmic replenishing of the fecund and steaming
earth calmed Richard Milne without quite pleasing him, as he walked
about the black ground of the hollows, the lighter gravel land of the
tobacco ridges. Along the river there were many gullies and ditches
overgrown, in which the rank vegetation smothered the raw outlines of
the ground. In a swamp a forest, a pond of nettles higher than a
man's head waved acridly, wavered and bowed like long trees,
fern-like, in the light breeze, some recoiling more quickly than
others, jostling and bowing back and forth to each other. They had a
symbolic malevolence, a blue-green sea of fire, and Richard Milne
watched it for moments without thinking.

Sumach grew densely along moist ditches, rank, with stalks as
thick as a man's arm, little groves towering branchless twenty feet,
at that height to spread a thick thatch of green which withstood
light showers: it was like tropical vegetation. That year the
elderberries grew thick and weighty on brittle stalks, changing from
discs of cream frothiness to dark, pendulous spheres of fruit,
purple, which almost seemed to swell with the increasing rains.

This richness of greenery and bitter yellow, blue-grey stems,
purple fruit, stretched above his head, seeming to bury his
consciousness as he walked about the overgrown ravines, the knolls,
and hollow places. The man would stop and sit on a bank under the
canopy of sumach and stare at the ground, black earth strewn with
rusty stems of the sumach leaves of other years, thinking of those
times and of Ada Lethen, while the rain began to patter unheeded
above him. So long he had been forced into a role of waiting that he
scarcely could believe in the singleness of his intention to escape.
Did he really want her as he had been telling himself so long? Was
his desire sincere? How could he know? In all else his decision, his
will sufficed. In this course he showed himself a veritable Hamlet.
But the mere thought of all their difficulties seemed to paralyse his
faculties. Surely it was some bewitched aura of that ill-starred
older pair. Perhaps, if he should take Ada Lethen, happiness would
never result. It might be a violation of the natural course which
would wrench them away from all seemly conduct of life and fill their
lives with disaster.

"All their difficulties." It appeared to him that they were joined
in struggle with those at least, though what joined them were the
instrument of their separation. As with ill-starred lovers of
romance, Tristram and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere, the craven
bully Fate seemed to have taken a spite against them, and would never
remit his rancour. He saw this aspect seldom, and indeed it might
have been his acceptance of it as a commonplace which determined his
bent toward romance in his creative efforts, while it made him credit
literally the prohibition which walled in Ada Lethen.

But besides this he could not forget all his failures. She was so
identified with them, he saw, that it was a wonder that his love
could endure. Yet it did, and though at moments of desperation he was
almost decided to risk any action, resolve was neutralized by the
annoyance attending memory of small past absurdities, the memory
which leaves a greater sting than that of our disasters and our
mistakes.... So it was that he had become one with a sense of
frustration and releasing melancholy which permitted him to see all
things as though they were portions of a futilely past dream.

The clouds thickened. Nothing, he was sure, could hurt him more
than he had been hurt; he had nothing to fear unless, at worst,
returning to the city, that old hunger would envelop him, twisting
him to its shapes before he could bury himself in work. There, where,
his mind told him, he could see that face behind all his trouble, he
would be almost at peace after a time in a struggle perpetual, and
perpetually baffled even by success. Only, in the parks, theatres, on
the streets, in photographs even, there would be couples, beautifully
oblivious. ... Ah! Their smiles, trusting eyes. Happy! He smiled
grimly.

Perhaps he was not a happy man; too determined. Nor was he,
evidently, determined enough. What determined men did, he did not
know. They did not abduct recalcitrant ladies, certainly, as he was
thinking of doing. Presumably they forgot, in a sea containing better
fish than ever had come out of it.

He had stopped, bemused, and he now saw that he was not alone. A
short, drab-clothed figure was standing near by, looking at him
fixedly through the half mist of the dull afternoon. Richard wondered
how long this person had been standing there watching him, before he
recognized the bumpy, hard features of Carson Hymerson under the
slouched brim of his old hat. There was nothing menacing in his
attitude. Rather it was as though he were trying to decide whether
Richard would permit him to approach and greet him after what had
passed between them.

Richard started to move away, but Carson was approaching him with
a sheepish grin.

"Funny little weather, ain't it?" he remarked, as though they had
parted an hour ago. "Great day for--for ducks."

Richard remained silent, but he nodded non-committally, wondering
what was on the other's mind.

"Funny way of farming, the old bird has," Carson continued,
looking about at the underbrush and the weeds and nettles in the bog
before him. "The place sure needs somebody to take hold and take an
interest in it. Of course, there is some waste land on it, bound to
be, where that peat bog was burnt over. But when I've had it a couple
of years and get it ploughed under, you won't know the farm. You want
to come back some time and see it, Richard. Always welcome, you know.
No hard feelings." He spoke in a tone of magnanimity, yet as though
expecting that his good intentions would not be credited.

Richard had an impulse to laugh. He looked at the man steadily.
"So you intend to go ahead and try to put this man off his
property?"

"Yes," agreed Milne drily, "but we have different ideas about what
is ours."

"That doesn't matter," said Carson. "That won't hinder me
any."

The doggedness of his tone aroused a perverse streak in Milne. He
would ignore the whole matter.

"How are Mrs Hymerson and Arvin keeping?" he inquired blandly, as
though he had heard nothing.

"All right," growled Carson. "Old Lethen may think I'm going to
let him off, but I ain't. Not any more, I'm out to get what's mine,
and don't you forget to tell him."

"This weather is not the most favourable for the crops, is it? How
is that piece of corn doing which I was cultivating? It must be
getting rather weedy, is it not?"

"They been a public nuisance long enough, the Lethens. It's time
somebody got stirred up about them."

A flush came into Richard's cheeks, but he continued calmly.

"The quarrels and bickerings of children are very amusing, are
they not? I find it so, for example, in the case of Bill Burnstile's
family. I have been stopping with them. I suppose you knew."

Carson looked as though words would be inadequate to express his
infuriation.

"You tell him from me to go to hell. I don't care for him and all
his friends with him," he yelled, stamping his feet.

Richard looked at him in some surprise. This was not the tone of
the crafty mortgage holder, nor yet of Carson as he knew him. He
shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

"Tell them all to go to hell!" Carson yelled again.

It occurred to Richard that he might inform the man that he was
trespassing on the property of others, but he was doing the same
thing himself. ... In the same bland tone he called back:

"Let us hope that there'll be fair weather for a few days anyway."
He chuckled as he turned away.

Unheeding the rain, which was slackening, he pursued his way to
the Burnstile house, there to find a flare of early lamplight
brightening the steam from cookery in the warm kitchen --which was
filled with the swarming children. Bill the older came in with full
milk pails; he had done most of the chores before the late supper.
Nothing could dull the interest of these elusively vital children,
with their preoccupations of mischief and pique and jollity. And
after bantering them, listening to some drawled story of Burnstile's
experience in the West, to which his wife at the other end of the
table gave a lazily enigmatic smile, he went to his room and lit a
lamp.

There, after looking through a haphazard pile of popular
magazines, he took up The Scarlet Letter, one of the three
books.

"How are Mrs Hymerson and Arvin keeping?" he inquired blandly, as
though he had heard nothing.

"All right," growled Carson. "Old Lethen may think I'm going to
let him off, but I ain't. Not any more. I'm out to get what's mine,
and don't you forget to tell him."

"This weather is not the most favourable for the crops, is it? How
is that piece of corn doing which I was cultivating? It must be
getting rather weedy, is it not?"

"They been a public nuisance long enough, the Lethens. It's time
somebody got stirred up about them."

A flush came into Richard's cheeks, but he continued calmly.

"The quarrels and bickerings of children are very amusing, are
they not? I find it so, for example, in the case of Bill Burnstile's
family. I have been stopping with them. I suppose you knew."

Carson looked as though words would be inadequate to express his
infuriation.

"You tell him from me to go to hell. I don't care for him and all
his friends with him," he yelled, stamping his feet.

Richard looked at him in some surprise. This was not the tone of
the crafty mortgage holder, nor yet of Carson as he knew him. He
shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

"Tell them all to go to hell!" Carson yelled again.

It occurred to Richard that he might inform the man that he was
trespassing on the property of others, but he was doing the same
thing himself, ... In the same bland tone he called back:

"Let us hope that there'll be fair weather for a few days anyway."
He chuckled as he turned away.

Unheeding the rain, which was slackening, he pursued his way to
the Burnstile house, there to find a flare of early lamplight
brightening the steam from cookery in the warm kitchen --which was
filled with the swarming children. Bill the older came in with full
milk pails; he had done most of the chores before the late supper.
Nothing could dull the interest of these elusively vital children,
with their preoccupations of mischief and pique and jollity. And
after bantering them, listening to some drawled story of Burnstile's
experience in the West, to which his wife at the other end of the
table gave a lazily enigmatic smile, he went to his room and lit a
lamp.

There, after looking through a haphazard pile of popular
magazines, he took up The Scarlet Letter, one of the three
books,

12

In the morning Bill Burnstile said, "Well, I kind of didn't want
to be too sure about giving up hope, but she sure does look juberous.
Rains the minute you turn your back. That your doings, Richard?"

The two met in the cool morning sunlight outside the back door.
Bill was coming in from the before-breakfast chores, and Richard
stood on the stoop, shaven, and dressed in a grey suit and soft
linen, inhaling the unflawed air.

"This'Il keep you oif that oats field two more days, I suppose,"
he agreed.

As the weeks had passed the wheat had been cut and shocked as best
it might be, and for the greater part stood out through the rains,
turned over with forks after each of them, in view of a day of
vantage when it could be hauled into the barns or threshed in the
open. The fields of standing oats were creamy ponds, awaiting the
binder, but the ground was so soft that the horses could scarcely be
expected to pull it.

"Looks as though it'll be September before we get around to
cutting the oats, all right--if any'd be left in the heads! But I'm
going to tackle that late piece that's not quite ripe first, as soon
as I can get on it at all. It won't be lodged so much, being short,
and besides if it is a little green, it doesn't hurt oats, that part.
Ripen afterward, and like as not turn out better than the good oats
this year...."

"I tell you," proposed Richard, "I'll give you a hand shocking if
it looks like rain." A sympathetic impatience with the weather made
him anxious to see things accomplished when the opportunity did
occur.

"Great!" acceded Burnstile gladly, "We'll make things hum. I was
trying to round up a man or two down to the village last night. They
got lots of time to talk, but none to work, unless they happen to
feel like it. They're rich as long as they got a dollar. Jess Trimble
says why don't I hire you. You had nothing to do but hang around that
Lethen girl, what never was any good, but to keep her head stuck in
books and get it crammed full of trash." He laughed.

Richard flushed, but curbed his temper. He knew that Bill had not
the slightest malice in repeating such a thing, that he quoted it
solely to exemplify the amusing obtuseness of local character. It had
not occurred to Richard that these people had their attitude toward
such anomalies as Ada Lethen and himself, and that they would be
talking to no uncertain purpose. What they thought or said could be
of no conceivable importance, he argued, but the gossip which Bill
had repeated rankled within him.

In his writing, Richard Milne had concerned himself with such
people as these, typical farm characters. But while he had blinked
none of their littlenesses, critics had claimed that his novels
presented too roseate a picture of rural life. The reason was that he
had seemed to find these temporal idiosyncrasies set off in due
proportion against the elemental materials of life. But, he reflected
now, that attitude was part of the nostalgia he experienced from his
own past in such scenes; and it was a form of idealism which he saw
as applicable no more to this milieu than to any province of life
more or less open to primal forces. He would not have idealized these
in a setting of commerce or of society, and he had been wrong to blur
them in a scene which his boyhood had known. Hence, he foresaw, a
further development in his own art. An increasing surface hardness
seemed to be an inevitable accompaniment to the progress of the
significant novelists of his and an earlier day. It was curious to
find himself, with his infinite sensitiveness to change in his
outlook and his inner feelings, developing his relation to his work
even when his whole being and all his faculties seemed to be
concentrated on the image of the woman he loved.

It was, he remembered, only an image upon which all his thoughts
were converged. Allowing for the beginning and the course, attended
by absence and memory, of his love, he could not hope to see the
woman as others saw her. It had been one of the twin deities of his
life. His urge to expression--and this. Perhaps she was at the bottom
of his urge to write. Otherwise she might not have remained beside
all his efforts as they proceeded. And if she had been more than an
ideal--or less--he should have forgotten her in turning to any one of
the numbers of girls and women he had known, charming or admirable.
But he had remembered her, and perhaps the function of his repeated
returns was to renew the impression which her physical presence made
upon him, or to free him from it. And once back in this place, so
near to her, if farther than ever in spirit, he was obsessed, he
could not escape her appeal to the senses. It was the more confusing
after his long freedom from such feelings. He saw her face in its sad
meditation, and in its proud contours. He saw the soft, even curve of
her lips, which were a continual marvel to him whenever she came
before his sight. How a girl could go through all the spirit-chapping
experiences she had known without some weakness, some bitterness,
showing in that most sensitive feature, her mouth, was beyond his
comprehension. It was not a strong mouth, the mouth, "denoting
character," which exhibits an impervious attitude built up to
withstand the world, or an aggressive one to battle with it. Her lips
showed nothing of submission or revolt, nothing of joy or despair, in
repose, nothing but a sweet calm and an understanding sympathy not to
be betrayed into sentimental sorrow, a calm sweetness never to be
betrayed into hasty greed of sensation. Her mouth, he thought, was
Ada Lethen.

Her hands, too, pale, large, narrow, graceful, and yet easily
forgotten. Her arms were slightly too slender for them, despite her
vigorous life. Her figure was slight, yet not without modelling. Her
hair was heavy and dark as night, her commonest gesture a turning of
it aside from her forehead. She had recently had it bobbed, though he
had not noticed this until the second meeting, in daylight, when she
had sent him away from her.

But her distinguishing mark, to a stranger, was a mole below her
left cheek, at the corner of an equilateral triangle formed between
it, her eye, and the corner of her mouth. It was thus in the least
conspicuous and yet most effective spot. For it gave piquancy to her
face, added to her otherwise sombre beauty; made it distinguished and
unforgettable, while one would not remember explicitly, "She had a
mole." It was ornament and relief. It was the most endearing feature
in her face; its loss would have detracted greatly, and yet he forgot
constantly that she possessed it.

She came before him, night after night, and scarcely left his
daytime thoughts, more seductive than she ever was in reality. She
did not in fact present such a quality to the world. He resiously
doubted whether she would charm many men, even men of more than
average insight. She was like some rare work of art, inordinately
admired, even idolized, by a few devotees, tolerantly assessed by
snobs and cognoscenti, and neglected by the world. He at least knew
her value; and to him she was far more seductive even of face and
limb than any woman he had encountered. Her spell was such that it
met him at every point, in his memory.

Such considerations could not always be pleasant, and he was glad
of any opportunity of distraction. When the following morning was
again bright, Richard put on old clothes. After breakfast he and Bill
got the binder out of the shed, tightened the canvases which had been
unbuckled to allow for stretching from moisture, and drove back the
muddy lane.

"We'll get a start anyway. The horses should hold out to get
around once, wet or no wet, and it may get drier as we go."

"If it doesn't rain we'll have a dry time," Richard assented with
a shout, striding behind the jingling and jolting binder, with risen
spirits.

It was a day enchanted, aside from the unpleasantness under foot,
with the harmonious concord usually imparted only to art or dreams.
The woods held aloof in misty solitude, like a vision, though the
warm air gave most objects an appearance of being near. Later, vast
cool clouds began a sultry procession above the land. They hung like
vast bags, bunches of dirty blue silk protruding from the meshes of a
net formed by their fissures. And toward noon the sun gave them a
silver radiance, hardening to metal likewise the verdigris of
forests. The air was still heavy, close. Horses and men sweated
copiously.

As before in the wheat-cutting, the three sizable Per-cherons
could pull the binder only a few rods without weakening; and when the
ponderous machine slowed, the broad drive wheel slid in the soft
black soil, digging furrows a foot wide, almost that deep, and as
many feet long as the horses could drag the binder thus, while the
heads were torn from the stalks. Soon the field was spotted with
these dark trenches, as though some preternaturally active rodent had
been digging his home there in great numbers. And the horses were
losing their freshness, even their willingness, as though they did
not expect that their best efforts would cause the binder to run more
than a few yards.

Richard with a fork pitched briskly out to the fence the sheaves
thrown in from the first round, so that the binder could turn and
begin cutting in the normal fashion, with a leftward circuit. After
that he had little to do, since several rounds had to be reaped
before he could shock the bundles conveniently without carrying them
too far. The sheaf-carrier, controlled by Bill Burnstile's foot,
dropped the sheaves in bunches of two and three and four, at
intervals the same for every round. Richard lay on a couple of
sheaves and looked up to the sky. Tom, now that he was not needed to
"throw out," appeared and knelt on another sheaf beside him.

"Kind of thistley, ain't it, for shocking," mentioned the boy,
selecting a stalk from his sheaf, and slowly spitting through it.

Richard smiled. "Good boy! You knew that without taking hold of a
single bundle, didn't you." He looked away with absent enjoyment over
the country. One elm, even in the noonday light, standing against the
sky on the river bank alone seemed to gather about itself a slight
haze, a softness over its green.

Tom's lips twisted naively. "I got hold of a bundle all right,
didn't I? This one I'm sitting on! ... That's why I didn't want to
shock none. Thistles are too much of a good thing, I can tell
you."

Milne began to lecture lazily in a r61e of practicality. "You
should have spudded the thistles out when you saw they were going to
grow faster than the oats. Before they get ripe, that's the time to
catch thistles. . . . Now look at that white thistledown. . . ." He
puffed at his pipe dreamily. "Very pretty no doubt... floating over
the field...."

"Don't catch thistles at all, that's me, boy! Too sharp. Not in my
bare feet, anyhow. When Dad got me in here to spud out the docks, I
found out! There weren't many docks, though." The boy looked at his
brown and mud-caked feet stuck out before him.

"Probably not many more than there are now," reflected Milne
silently, looking over the field where an occasional maroon-coloured
spire showed itself. The farm had been neglected in the matter of
weeds before Bill Burnstile settled upon it.

Suddenly there was a scream from Tom, and, turning, Richard saw
the boy's neck encircled by smaller hands. Bill and Johnnie were upon
him, gasping.

"I never said Td slap your face. Go 'way, can't youl" Tom thrust
at them, cunningly taking an injured tone as though interrupted in a
grown-up colloquy. The smaller two backed away, looking at the man
with laughing respect. But Tom was leaving nothing to afterclaps, and
knelt on the sheaves.

"Can you do this?" he asked, attempting to stand on his hands, and
falling over backward in the stubble.

Richard, for whom the display was given as much as for the
marauders, glanced back as he walked away to recommence shocking, and
smiled at the failure. Bill and Johnnie, witnessing this reception of
the attempted feat, began to pummel Tom again, and his yells
resounded in the field, uplifted in the uncertain, husky, or shrill
tones of his age.

But little Johnnie came presently trotting after Richard, and
watched the man work, in silence or saying words softly to himself,
and occasionally running to take up an odd bundle left over, to drag
it to a site where Richard could use it to build the next shock, two
and two.

By noon the sunlight was clear and hot, the air still rather
heavy. They had not made much impression on the field of oats. The
area cut around the edge did not appear very wide. But all hands were
hungry, including the boys, who rode up the lane on the three
sweating horses. The perfect purity of the air was tinged by the
heavy, moist smell of the grass and trees, by the animal odours of
the barnyard, and finally by bacon and boiled potatoes, rhubarb
pie.

After dinner the day became overcast, and Burnstile, as the two
men fastened the weighty ends of the binder neck-yoke to the horses'
necks, opined with a curious and unusual depression that he might as
well not go on cutting; it was going to rain, sure as anything.
Besides, packing the land would do it no good. He had brought Tom to
the field to help, but presently the boy lingered behind Richard
shocking, and slipped away into the woods beside the field, or into
the lane which led to the house and barn.

Already proceeding toward the west, the sun might have been
forgotten ssve for a cliff of cloud the shape of the map of Denmark,
the illuminated top of which covered the sun, while the lower part
was boundaried by a quicksilver edge. The binder was driven on
doggedly, and Burnstile's shouts could be heard resounding dully from
one end of the field to the other. The hair of the horses was
roughened and spiked with sweat, and when they stopped at one corner
of the uncut rectangle, where Richard was working, Bill could be
heard, apparently talking half to himself:

"I don't know what's got into me, seem so stupid today. Horses, if
you have your off days when you don't feel any funnier than I do just
now, and you've got to work, I feel sorry for you."

Richard smiled absently as one who listens to a child, and
gathered two more bundles in his abraded hands. The strip which had
been cut around the field was dark with the stubble of rank weeds and
the black soil. There was a rhythmic swish as he strode on, stooping
to catch up one bundle and then another to put under the other arm.
The sharp, crisp rectangle of uncut oats in the centre of the field
was cream-tipped, stretching away out of sight, and the pale blue
bottoms of the stalks gleamed in a strange light.

Wind arose, and blew the thistledown about the oats field, to the
imperturbable bush, like swarms of some swift insect bent on a common
goal; and a few like bubbles settled in the black trenches dug by the
starting binder. Day was overcast, and it seemed that the elements
were bent on a dreadful play before some outburst of passion.
Swallows high in the air seemed higher against the dark smoke-blue of
a storm cloud, ecstatically battling with the wind, hanging
stationary and struggling against it, while one lone bird executed a
long, straight dart of half a mile at aeroplane speed with the
gale.

The oats field and the gloomy light were curiously lethargic in
their tranquillity, even the forests seemed to toss with a heavy,
slow resignation which was strange to the tumult above the earth. At
the southwest, above the horizon, glowed light, cool, green-blue sky,
but above that a torn selvage of cloud writhed, and vast continents
of them were flocking from the northwest. Drops fell heavily on the
backs of Richard Milne's hands as he worked.

All at once he was aware of little Johnnie beside him. The child's
dark eyes were full and glowing, his dirty face ecstatic, as he
gambolled over the sheaves, apparently without seeing Milne, who
nevertheless had an attraction which he could not resist. He paused,
looking on, the toes of one foot rubbing his calf.

"Where do you come from?"

"Me? Anywhere! Can't I go some!" The boy's bare legs twinkled as
he ran, and looked back. "It's going to storm! It's going to storm!
But not today."

"How do you know not today, old man? Don't those stubbles and
thistles hurt your feet?"

Stopping at the edge of the uncut oats, the little boy pulled
stalks from the wet earth and flung them, roots up, into the air, his
bright face turned up until they fell, twisted by the wind.

"I can't help you, so I think I'll go," sang the urchin.

"That's right," agreed Milne, "better go to the house and keep in
the dry." But Johnnie stayed, now following behind, now running ahead
into the standing oats and out again, stopping, swaying, his face
uplifted to the wonder of the sky.

"It don't look like rain, but the drops are falling, falling like
spiders."

Richard Milne started, as though he had forgotten something, but
he had only remembered, as one to whom every word of magic unlocked a
certain door; and he went on with the abandon of one who had longed
in idleness for the day of labour. The sweat was in his eyes.

At the end of the field a wide strip of rows of bundles awaited
his completion of the round; and as he set up each row evenly a strip
was left behind him again, to be widened as the binder made its
circuits, until once more he would be faced with a wide expanse of
prostrate sheaves in waves. . ..

Johnnie had gone, and there were no more shouts at the horses, nor
the shuttling rattle of the binder. Bill Burnstile waved at him from
the lane, where he walked behind the three horses to the barn. The
long bamboo whip in the derelict binder slenderly speared the
uncertain sky. It might be quitting time, though all the afternoon
had been dusk. Perhaps Bill was leaving the field in fear of rain,
but it was more likely that his horses had had enough for the
day.

Instead of looking at his watch, Richard went on working. He was
on the side of the forest now, which stirred gustily; and looking
toward it, his eye caught the figure of a woman, walking, turning
back, going farther within its shade.

After a few steps he was sure, and then he ran.

"Ada! Ada Lethen!"

She stopped and regarded his approach without surprise. Her
musical voice greeted him, seeming to change the course of his soul
like a rifle bullet in the heart of the hunted. It was a glorious
day. But too much of the day's spirit of storm was within him to know
the words that he said; and with foreboding he knew only that he was
to be drawn into saying all that he ever had said, and as ever
vainly. He looked into her quiet face; when her eyes answered his
they filled with tears. The two stopped.

"Ada, you do love me?"

"I love you."

13

The words, repeated as though by an echo, left him lightheaded;
but her lips had moved, she had spoken, at last spoken all. As a
crackling fire in a great downpour of rain he was quieted in spirit
momentarily even as he held her with fierce arms.

"Then we shall go, Ada. Today--tonight. Just as we are. We can buy
clothes and everything when we get to the city. There is another
world besides this one, which you must know. Where you can be all
yourself."

As he spoke a doubt like pain spread in his mind, and it was as
though she voiced it in her whisper. Everything had been the same
before.

"No. No, we cannot go."

Slowly he was numbed, as though he had disenchanted the moment by
repetition of an old maleficent charm. Her eyes held his anxiously.
In the forest of this world, the same invisible dell of passion and
anguish, of a commingled loneliness which made more poignant than all
else the solitude of their aching souls. The same; the same!

"We can't."

"Ah, you say that!" he murmured after a moment, in a choking tone.
"It's a monstrosity, that feeling. It is as though one in the free
air should say, 'I can't breathe,' or an angel, 'I can't fly.' When
heaven depends upon it, it suddenly looms as impossible. Oh, Ada, is
it your feeling of the oppressive rooms--it must be a long oppression
of those rooms of narcissi. It can't be your mind assents to such a
lie. . . . Tell me your mind knows that it is only a fallacy."

Ada Lethen glanced aside as though about to walk on; or as though
for refuge from inexorable compulsion, from inquiry addressed to her
being more poignantly than from the plaintive lips of this man. She
raised her slender, large left hand to her breast, in a gesture which
tinged for him the bitterness of that moment with the old sense that
nothing she could do. no action or tone of hers, but could give
inimitable joy, the more profound for seeming to tease with surprise.
The trees in a livid frenzy of the wind paused, while a dying breath
seemed to brush past the grasses and weeds at their feet. Their
silence lasted for a long while, deepened, lapsed, and became
stringent again.

"Oh, Richard, I have told you! I have confessed what my whole soul
has fought against. And when I tell you I do love you--you are not
satisfied."

He stared as though addressing the horizon. "I should be glad
you've admitted that you love me, in that case. You are a mystery."
But the words of youthful, defiant pique were deep-ened with a note
of restraint from almost maddening uncertainty. She turned away.

As they walked on through the forest its depths grew more
profound, more sheltering, though it seemed that they held somewhere
a vortex of storm to cover the pair. The tall, stately trunks and
thick, fallen trunks, mossy stumps, pools of brown water at the foot
of this tree or that, hollows and brush piles, the general unevenness
of the ground, made it appear before they had penetrated a hundred
yards of the bush that they had traversed miles, over appalling
inequalities of footing and divergencies of course. To this effect
the obstacles added by raising a resistance in their minds which made
them hurry on, hand in hand over the difficult places, until it was
as though they were in retreat, a flight whose openness made them a
little ashamed to conceal the goal.

"Why must you talk--in this way?" But she gasped as though already
they had begun their flight to freedom. She stopped abruptly. They
looked at each other.

"Talk!" exclaimed Richard Milne in deepened tones, as it were of
wrath. "It is the curse of our whole position." Her eyes fled,
remote, but otherwise she did not move by a hair's quivering.

She laughed a little, with a halt, as though from breath-lessness
or from potential hysteria. "I should have said the lack of talk. My
parents do not even discuss each other with me any more."

". . . Give them enough of their accursed silence," muttered the
man, as though his thoughts were far away. "Your pity amounts to
heartlessness, finally, if it does not lose them their soul." In his
mind was a bitter desire to deride their lack of any such possession,
to resort to any cruelty, to deny her devotion to them, the devotion
which she held so dearly. Shouldn't she suffer for his pain too? What
love had those two ever given her? His own detachment--which forced
him to restraint and to a realization of the selfishness of which he
was a vehicle--won his curses as part of the spell.

As they walked on, the trees thinned on the other side of the
bush, and they came to the smooth grass of the border of the woods,
the springy, hollow-sounding turf, and walked among the stoic
inverted pendulums of the mulleins--frigid northern cactus--under a
lowering sky and gusts of wind. From the height of land they could
see the river stretched away to the east and below them, like a
heavy-linked silver chain extending to the sky, with curves here and
there, links formed by a tiny islet, or an overhanging intervened
bough. The girl was walking briskly now as though to a definite goal,
almost as though she were forgetting him.

"Ada, I don't want you to think I don't appreciate that you love
me. Say it again!" Her eyes seemed fixed on some symbolic vision that
had nothing to do with the trees, the river, the darkening sky, the
drops of heavy rain, the urgent man. "But if you do, there can be no
question of things continuing in the manner of the present situation.
It's one thing or the other."

The confident words abashed himself, for Ada Lethen was not
animated to the length of assent or denial. Her silence made
meaningless the most eloquent plea that he could find in his
inexhaustible courage to repeat. Before them stood the great beech
tree, its upper boughs writhing above the bank of the river;
complaining softly, every leaf moved in ecstasy, though the body of
the tree itself seemed to be in torment, until they stood above it
and looked down into the hollow, to the promontory its roots held
against the wear of the river. The curtain of morning-glory vines was
spread over the two cedars before it, and on the other side was the
curve in the thicketed river bank.

As though remembering that they had stopped, she took one step,
and his hand caught her hand, pulling her around. "Let's go down," he
said in a tender tone. "Of course we shall." He stepped half sidelong
down before her, holding up his palm, which at the last drop, a jump
of three feet, she took. Her fingers were not released even when they
sat beneath the tree, over the running water, and he held her in his
arms. When there was a pause in their kissing he looked down into her
eyes, whispering once more, "Say it again."

She bent back her head, looked long with glinting eyes, which
seemed to mirror and contain all deviously beautiful and simple
things of the world, into his face, and raised her arms to draw his
head down.

"I love you."

It was as though the whisper spoken entered, became part of his
being, returning between them, until there was no intervention in its
passage between her soul and his, his and hers.

With a single movement that seemed familiar, easy as old endearing
thought, his arms lifted her. On his knees, her arms never left his
neck. They were silent for a long time, until he was again invaded by
painful foretaste of the transitory and literal nature, the illusion
of possession.

"Why do you feel the way you do?" he muttered hoarsely as if in a
fever of haste. "Can'tyou let those two people take care of
themselves? I tell you it would be the best thing that ever happened
to them. It would have been the best thing long ago. You see that
now? Of course you do!" His arms tightened.

There was a smile on her face he could not see, but her silence
was neither indeterminate nor happy. Her cheek touching his drew away
as if with resolve. Her voice was almost tearful, "Oh, dear Richard,
why must we never forget them? Why must you always try to make me
change my mind? You can see my duty as well as I...."

"You see," he returned simply. "Even you want to forget, you're
admitting. . . . You know that you can't be happy that way, and that
there must be a change."

All pain seemed focused in her great steady eyes looking into the
forest, and she spoke at length slowly. "You are right that ten years
ago--oh, twenty years ago when that happened and I didn't understand,
it would have been the right thing to do. Now, how can I? What can be
done? I doubt whether either would recognize the tones of the other's
voice. When Mother talks to me it is always when he is away, and she
worships the narcissi. When I go outside. Father stops his work and
tells me what is on his mind. And I know that if they did not have
anyone to tell their troubles to--"

Richard Milne was silent again as she had been, withdrawn, his
arms as it were galvanized, staring vindictively into the opposite
darkening bank of the river. The consciousness of his complete
abstraction reached them both at the same instant and he kissed her
once more, automatically, and looked away, his mind engaged intensely
in a struggle for relevance. She looked at him and a realization
crept over her, At last, drawing an immense breath, he spoke, and his
words were alien though not unfamiliar.

"Perhaps you think me harsh. You know them better than I. I have
never had any doubt that they are, or were, or should have been fine
people. You don't object to my being open? Separately, that is." His
voice revealed no humorous intention.

"Why should I object to anything you may say," she murmured with a
sort of contrition, almost equivalent to repeating her declaration,
as though, now, she were determined somehow to accept his love and
his convictions coupled with her devotion to her parents, however
troubling these commingled elements (in the calm lake of her
being).

Richard Milne saw this, and saw the futility of trying to bring
her to a choice--a conscious choice--in which her mind would bear the
burden. There would come a time when it would be seen accomplished,
without her having known. It was as though independently of volition
that his words continued.

"What they have done to you. . . . They have shaped your spirit to
what it is, and perhaps--certainly I should be the last to complain.
But only the rareness of its tempering has saved it. You have come
past pain to sweetness. But you would be happier and we could love
each other no less, had you not pitied them--too well. When they were
hurt, they put you by, callously; then they discovered your power to
assuage, and bent your tender soul to theirs like a splint between
their festered wounds."

Very still, she made no answer, the eyes dark in her pale face, as
though the words had struck her vitally through a recess in the
wilderness which guarded her heart. His voice rose in the old
unrewarded eloquence.

"Though it gave you all understanding, it was a weight of pity too
cruel for a young soul. Though a tree grow beautiful and strong,
wind-shaped on a hill, though your spirit has taken on the colour of
poetry, you have known too much sacrifice, and I am trembling for the
tragedy you may yet know, my lady."

He was conscious of a futile exaltation of spirit, conscious of
his own attempt to move her, and in a maze of words he thought that
he descried the loss of their love, now it was recognized, and
pictured his own barren assuagement in memory. Even the fact that
they had confessed their love would not take away the reservations,
would not make any difference in the end. He felt like rising and
walking away from the spot, but that would make their memories
bitter, when they should be tempered with the melancholy of longing,
not of regret.

"Dear, dear, my dearest Richard 1" Her voice broke on a sob. "I
know it must seem hard.... You know the tragedy is not--not all in
the future. It hasn't been easy. And I can't imagine what would have
happened...."

Silenced, humbled by her strong undeniable feeling which at last
answered his and cast aside intellectual reservations, Richard Milne
kissed her hands, her neck, as though in adoration of her
sacrifice.

"Never in future at all," he murmured as one wilfully disregarding
the import of life: struggle, from which Ada Lethen had freed herself
momentarily by declaring her love, and back to which he must win, if
he were to hold his own love and hers in the inexorable condition of
development.

Ada Lethen put her tears by, with a little unhappy laugh. "You
know," she began, speaking in another curiously more ultimate tone.
"Father was so grateful to you for advising him in the trouble about
the farm. He said he didn't know what he should have done if you had
not stepped into the breach."

"Of course, under the circumstances, there was nothing else to do.
One couldn't allow such a thing to take place." Richard was anxious
to know precisely the facts of the entanglement, which scarcely had
seemed vital before. But he could not ask Ada. With all his
resentment against her father, he could not expect her to tell him
the truth of the matter, even if she understood. For he was assured
that there could not be right only on one side and obliquity on the
other. That he had come to dislike Carson Hymerson was perhaps more
or less extraneous to the case. And his feeling on the other side was
even more mixed.

"I remember," he told Ada Lethen, "how I looked up to your father
when I was a boy. There was no other man in the community like him.
... I suppose really I owe him more on that account than I'll ever
know. He did not notice my worship, of course. But at meetings of any
kind, or church, I would always pick him out, admiring his fine
bearing and his features --I would recognize his erect brown head
among any crowd. Your father was handsome then. No wonder you are
beautiful."

She had slipped from his arms. "We must be going." He clung to her
hand and would have drawn her down beside him, but a glance at her
face made him rise. What was it? Mere distrust of his eloquence? Was
there a jealousy in her attachment for her parents which made
perilous all reference to them, even the most favourable? But he did
not need to search his memory to know the outcome to that, and to see
danger. She had already turned away and begun climbing up the
bank.

Whether the evening were coming early because of the overcast and
threatening sky, or whether they had lingered in the ravine more
nearly insensible to the passing of time than they knew, it seemed
that the end of day had come. Clouds covered the western sky, but as
they walked, in silence, a jagged fissure brightened and widened
above the horizon, emitting gold rays as it were indirectly, whether
from above it or below did not appear.

The wind had died to a faint flaw of warm breeze here and there in
the spaces of the bush and the trees, and as they walked they saw
great drops hanging from wild-apple twigs, maple leaves, from
drooping sumach, and knew that it must have rained more than they
knew in their sheltered oblivion.

"Ada," Richard spoke, "I think you love your parents with a great
love. Perhaps it is that capacity in you which has led me to think of
you all these years. I'm not particularly a faithful sort, at
bottom."

She took his hand and held it over her heart, with a tremulous
laugh. "Oh, my love I You're--you're--"

"I'm what?" he asked, smiling in turn, as though a burden were
slipping from him.

"You're so--seeing--feeling."

"Well, perhaps I was wanting you simply to Say It Again." His
smile was sudden, boyish, naive.

She pressed the hand as she let it fall gently. "I love you. I'll
never forget that."

They descended into a hollow in the path, over which hung tall
sumachs, presenting an unbroken front of screen, a spot familiar to
Richard's wanderings. Parting the younger shoots, he drew her by the
hand within.

There was space here, colonnades of the tall bare sumach stalks
twenty feet high, and an impenetrable roof above. After groping for a
few feet over the thick crinkled footing of faded sumach leaves and
stems, they came to a knoll above a further ravine again shaded with
sumach. The extent of the place was indeterminate, perhaps acres, but
only faint and indirect emanations of light spotted its complete
shelter.

Breathless, they sat down. "You can tell me better here. Sheltered
place ..." Richard muttered. Ada Lethen said not a word, but seemed
to have lost volition and tensity in the completeness of their
embrace, the frenzied haste and abandon of clinging. And interlocked
wholly, it was as though that still muffled soft nook were a temple
revealing a mystery even there too plangent and too overwhelming in
colour, in the wild clash and fusion of the senses through an ecstasy
which they created only to find it again in the whole pressure of a
suddenly cognizant universe--lost again in rapt, in overwhelming
confusion and merging with an element greater than all their minds
groping, their dreams mounting, their hearts seeking, had ever
foreknown. ...

Sobs made him raise his head from her breast. Ada Lethen's face
was covered by tears through which her eyes looked with strangeness,
and her fingers moved in his hair as he sank back.

"... so--happy." It could scarcely be heard.

"Mine! Mine!"

14

Yet it was complete content that embraced his mind as he lay in
his room that night, and the thought which came to him, whether then
or through the hours of sleep, was that nothing mattered, that
nothing became worth worrying about until one was starved. ... He
knew that he loved Ada Lethen more than he had ever loved her, but
his old desperation was a thing of the past. He never had known that
life was so simple, that thinking was unnecessary, and happiness
sure. His slumber was deep, complete and satisfying rest, and when he
rose the mirror told him he was smiling.

But the day brought uncertainties, and from the natural wish to go
directly to the Lethen place he allowed himself to be diverted by the
normal routine of the day. All the children were down for breakfast,
unusually lively, so that their mother and even Bill had to chide
them. Bright sunlight entered the dim kitchen and rested upon the
breakfast table. The storm had missed them, and the ground would be
in better condition. He knew that Bill expected him to continue
helping with the oats. Of course a few words of explanation would
straighten that out.

But again, would not Ada think that he was attempting to take
advantage of her? And that might prove fatal. Or would she expect him
... be hurt if he did not come? Shouldn't he think, in any case, get
the matter straightened out in his mind, devise a certain and summary
means of settling everything, finally and felicitously?

In brief, his gingerly mind in the first hour of the morning
allowed itself to be abetted by outer circumstances, and he went to
the field to resume shocking.

In high spirits, yet with a certain anticipatory fervour, he
trudged to the field. The boys chattered around him, ran ahead with
the barking dog, or lagged behind. He was breathing the freshness of
the morning air, the new warmth after the heavy rains. Already the
mud of the lane, still soft, was drier under foot, no longer
slippery. He lifted his head to the sky, blue with thronging white
clouds.

But as the day passed, and he attacked row after row of sheaves,
he learned that he had reckoned without the change which had taken
place, without himself. Perhaps he had unknowingly counted upon
seeing Ada Lethen again in the woods. But she did not appear.
Feverishly he worked through the hours, and it seemed by a most
intense concentration of will only that he was enabled to continue
work and not, in or out of sight of Burnstile, to climb the fence and
go in search of her to her home.

It seemed to be an endless day, and when the end of it came in
sight he was the first to leave the field. After changing his
clothes, he came down for supper before Burnstile and the boys had
come into the house. Not going to the kitchen where the evening meal
was waiting, simmering aromatically, he went to the front veranda and
sat down. He would not wait long for supper, hungry as he was, but
would go soon to the Lethen home.

There was a summer evening yellow cast to the air, though the sun
was still high. It would set rapidly, and more summarily with the
days of approaching autumn. But now Richard Milne saw a fulfilment
with the guise of significance in the passing of the summer, and even
in his preoccupation he looked out with interest and tenderness at
the fields and woods he was so soon to leave. At the roadside,
halfway between the lawn gate and the farm gate before the barn, lay
a patch of smelling white-pink phlox. The boys were coming past it to
supper, with their father trudging behind them, instead of using the
path on their own land, parallel with the road. An automobile passed
the house, slowed as it met them, and stopped beside the man. Supper,
Richard noted with impatience, would be postponed by the length of
one of those indefinite rural conversations.

While he was considering going away, for to demand supper on such
notice without waiting for the others would be an affront, Alice came
around the house, preceded by the cat, after which she ran with stiff
back and arms, widespread fingers, like some silhouetted figure
against a stage curtain: evidently in high spirits. Rustling after
came her mother. As they chased each other Mrs Burnstile laughed.

"I'll lay you right down on the ground and take off your shoes and
stockings. I will! Mind you-- You just wait till you want to wear my
shoes and stockings again."

Alice dodged about the lawn and behind the snowball bush. She was
taller than her mother, but slender and quicker. Mrs Burnstile
rustled swiftly about, her arms sloping like wings.

There was the sound of the starting car, and they paused to watch
its departure.

"Hurry on. Dad; and rescue me!" cried Alice, breathless, in her
halting tones. The boys rushed onto the lawn screaming something
about Hymerson. Gaunt Bill followed with a wry smile. The younger
girls appeared. Richard Milne stepped down from the veranda,
momentarily surprising the women.

"Well, what do you think's happened now?" the farmer demanded of
him. "Young Eldon going along now, he tells me Carson Hymerson's gone
and kicked over the traces."

"How--what--what'd he do?" everyone wanted to know.

"Well, the story is likely to be different with everyone, and
you'll hear all sorts of things. But what he says is that
Carson had a stroke or something, and they took him away. To the
asylum he says, but he could easy have got mixed."

"He's crazy, he's loony! Asylum!" shrilled the boys.

"Children, go in and get washed for supper," commanded Burnstile.
Offhand as he had seemed, it was evident that he had not heard the
news without being impressed.

"I guess there's some truth about it," he answered Milne's silent
look of inquiry. "Well, I can't say I'm altogether surprised at him
breaking up. He's not been right. But 1 can't quite see the
reason."

"There is one, we may be sure," Milne replied, turning away. "Was
Arvin involved in this?"

"Didn't say. Eldon said he flew into a rage about something, and
finally they got the police, and it took a bunch of them.... It
appears he got violent. He kept hollering something about everybody
being in a conspiracy against him."

"That seemed to be his delusion when I was there," remarked
Milne.

"Yes, he hollers that old Lethen is a 'stumbling block.'
'Stumbling block to his fellow man!' he yells. And Arvin was an
ungrateful cub. And you, you was something, what was it now, a
meddler. But Arvin, he was the ungrateful cub you couldn't do
anything for."

Throughout supper these statements were repeated and amended.
Richard scarcely paid them heed, though he registered them in his
mind, and put questions. But after a momentary excitement the boys
forgot the whole matter, and they were outside before Richard had
taken his hat and gone from the house. They were playing at the
roadside, about the patch of odorous phlox. In the first tincture of
dusk tobacco moths rose from it, and as they rose the boys swatted
them with their caps.

"I'll pull his head off and he'll fly in the air," Bill shrieked,
looking after the man.

15

At the Lethen house Ada was sitting on the veranda as she had been
another night. For a moment, the difference, the change, was all he
felt. Then, curiously, his thought turned and again he knew that he
was once more uncertain, fearful of defeat. What could happen? His
heart began to shake within him. The feeling of one fractional
instant that nothing could be the same, was at once controverted by
the certainty that everything was as before.

She heard his step and looked up, startled, rose, half-turned as
if actually to re-enter the house. He moved swiftly. Her name on his
lips, her hands in his brought the old slow wistful smile, and they
sat down together.

"Well, have you made or prepared any good-byes?" An awkward
lightness came into his tone, and he felt that in pure anxiety he was
smiling foolishly. In his heart he was fearful, uncertain, even as he
laughed- Was foreboding an inevitable portion of success? "Happiness
maketh all men fools," he said.

"Yes." Her hand pressed his. "Yes," she said, "we are happy." Yet
there was a reservation more terrible than matter-of-factness in her
tone, so that he restrained himself violently from urging her to his
purpose. And before he knew, he was doing that very thing.

"Did you hear about Carson Hymerson?" he asked.

"Yes. Very sad. They say he believed that his son and Mrs Hymerson
were leagued against him."

"Oh, Ada, it's sad, very true, but surely that's not the first
thing you see in it. Now your father will be in no danger of losing
his place, and you and I are free."

"I wonder." She saw the sad and desperate look on his face as she
pronounced the words; she drew near. "Oh, don't think that anything
can be the same again. I do love you, Richard. But tell me honestly
what you think it means."

"I dare say everything about this accursed place means something
I've never guessed or suspected," he said coldly. "There'll never be
an end to mysteries, and Carson Hymerson probably has a great deal to
do with you and me of which I at least am quite unaware."

"Richard, don't talk like that. He had nothing to do with us."

"He seems to have had, to judge by the way you greeted the news.
An absurd old man, embittered by a tortured self-importance and
nameless pathological disturbances, goes crazy. Sad! Of course it's
sad. The world is full of sadness, if you like. We're not likely to
forget that too long. But we've got to forget it sometime, if we're
not intending to join the other sad people in cells or
underground."

"Dear, if you really want to know the reason I was thinking of it
at all, it's only that--well--why should I have to tell you this?
People say that Mr Hymerson wanted Arvin to 'go with' me, in hopes of
making a match, they say. It may not be true at all. But they say he
always has been teasing Arvin about me."

"Not in my presence."

"Not before you, of course, since he knew of your interest. . . .
Arvin and I have always been good friends. We see each other two or
three times a year."

"Well, that explains his attitude, partly. He began to lose hope
for that scheme, I suppose, and then he thought he'd try to take your
father's farm from him."

"It seems so. Your coming probably disturbed him."

"Not so much as it would have done if I had known," Richard
returned grimly.

"Don't you think Arvin was wise?" she asked, smiling.

"I don't doubt his sense of the fitness of things. He saw it was a
hopeless match, and did not try to do the impossible." Richard was in
better humour now.

She was silent, looking as of old across the familiar country. He
lit a cigarette, with something approaching equanimity.

"But tell me, honestly, do you think I can leave here?"

"Yes!" he exclaimed impetuously, as though for the first time,
without allowing himself space to divide his mind.

"Ada, it's the very thing you must do, the only thing to be done.
You've known too much of thinking first of others, of long tragic
thoughts, of unselfishness." His discourse seemed commonplace and
stale, but he kept on.

"Look here. I see you in exquisite gowns, radiant, differently
beautiful, flattered by the lights of famous restaurants, of
ballrooms I know. That's where we're going, for a little time-Do I
think you can go? I think there's nothing else you can do, in sanity
and health."

He spoke at length and with enthusiasm of his haunts, and possible
haunts in the city, and of his friends; spoke with humour, emotion,
automatically rising spirits, and enjoyment in courtship which he had
never known before. And as the evening passed she turned now and then
to look with a smile into his always present eyes, or looked away
into those fields and bush she always had known, and which she saw,
he was convinced, with the insight lent by the seers and poets of the
ages, part and portion in her unique and rich spirit. He had a sense
of her opulence such as he had never known before. They talked, were
silent, and she was charmed to be charmed. It seemed that they had
never before known peace; but it was a fleeting vision. . . . She was
sobbing against him. He could not remember any cause in his own
words

"I can't, I can't! Don't you see--what I'm afraid of? The same
thing would happen as-- Oh, no--nobody knows what would happen."

He was silent. The blow was overwhelming, seemed final, though he
seemed always to have expected it. He had found an incontrovertible
obstacle. "They're, they're tough!" he brought out with savage
absurdity. "I guess if all these years they have managed to stand it,
they won't come to any harm. You know what I think--that even yet
they would discover each other. Unless you are positive that it is
the wrong time, I think it would be well to see them, say tonight,
and explain the whole matter to them, get it all straightened out
reasonably."

She shuddered.

"You think it wouldn't help? Perhaps it would make things worse.
But it seems to be practicable. In fact it seems the only thing to
do. If one had a Shakespearean imagination now, to devise some
Measure for Measure plot, to reconcile them. . . Alas, such
things are too problematical in real life."

For the first time the thought Came to him that if all
intervention proved vain, perhaps he would take Mrs Lethen with them.
To his mood even that was not insuperable. Ada and he were going
away, whatever the barriers or impedimenta. But he rushed on in
urgent words. "Listen. You love me. ... I love you. We've--we must
have each other. Isn't that right?" Her hands and her lips, assented.
"And we can't be happy here. You see that. I doubt whether I could
even attempt to go on with my work. And you must, you must get away."
He knew that his work, which had been inspired first by her, would
never loosen its hold upon him, so that he could not be happy even
with her, without it. The realization was confusing, almost
sickening.

Was Ada thinking this? She had been looking at him with starry
eyes in the pearl dusk. Did she think his decision mere complacent
briskness? Now wearily she rose from the bench, and he with her, and
before she could turn into the house, he led her half by force down
the veranda and they walked in silence about the lawn in the shadow
of the tall pines, the upper boughs of which tossed a little in spite
of the apparent calm of the evening.

"Let us walk along the river," he proposed at length, when they
came to the gate at the road. She shook her head as it were sadly.
"Yes," he insisted, pulling her hand. It became limp, as though all
animation had gone out of her. He was struck by the difference,
perhaps not incongruous, between her attitude and his own inclination
to pick her up in his arms and run. Slowly, silently, they walked to
the veranda.

But they agreed tacitly not to ascend to it, and turned away to
the shadowed lawn once more. There was the feeling that all this had
happened before, drearily, many times. They could never do more than
return into that house, into the past; and a recognition, a far-off
salutation of it would be their only approximation to mortal
felicity.

"You don't really believe in happiness, that's it," he pronounced
with a slow bitterness as they turned at the gate once more. "You
don't believe that we could be happy. Do you?"

Ada Lethen did not answer. Then, as they turned and came beneath a
low-sweeping pine-bough, she stopped and her raised arms encircled
his neck, and her great eyes looked up. . .

Blood, spirit, pounded through him. They held each other so. The
resolve rose in him, lifted him as though on a wave: man or devil,
nothing human or enchanted would part them. They'd go. ... Yet he saw
that after all the moment was not yet.

Back on the veranda again they sat clasped, whispering. Darkness
had fallen, and with it the breeze had freshened. "You do believe
we'll be happy," he muttered softly in her ear. Once more they were
beyond time and space, He thought that he detected a movement of
assent.

"Above pity, we're above despair," she whispered. Then he knew
that her face was wet with tears, and held her close, comforting,
though he knew too that they were tears of pure joy. They were no
longer hungry and alone, and yet there was nothing left of the world,
of life.

Suddenly, he knew not after how long a time, Ada thrust his arms
from her, sat back on the bench, looking into the window which gave
oif the veranda with widening eyes. Without a word or question,
quickly he turned, hearing a noise within the room, though doors and
windows were closed. But it was too late to see what had happened.
The man was there, her father, stooping to the floor. He had somehow
dragged the chenille cloth from the table on which the narcissi had
been sitting. It must have been by accident, for he was stooped over
them, his grey head shaking as with palsy. He straightened one flower
and then another, which was ruined. He held them in his hand a
moment, looking at them.

Then all at once, as with an access of rage, or in some perverse
fear of leaving the thing incomplete, he stamped on the bulbs and
slender blossoms, ground them into the carpet. He went to others on
the sewing-machine, destroyed those, dashed them to the floor. The
two outside could hear his pant-ings. Ada Lethen's hand became cold,
and glancing at her, Richard feared that she would faint.

The crack of light beneath the door facing them widened, the door
opened, and at that moment Mrs Lethen, tall, pale, in white, entered.
For an instant, a long moment, her face was like a mask. Then it was
seemingly contorted in rage. The man stood with his back to them, at
bay.

"I did it!" they heard him hoarsely shout. "I did it purposely.
Now what?" He folded his arms with bravado, plainly meaning to insist
on his intention.

The livid face of Mrs Lethen changed. They did not know what to
think. It was fright, they knew, white fright in the realization that
after all it did not matter, her devotion of years, not in the sudden
discovery of feeling, words directed to her from this man. They could
see the strength leaving her as she sank into a chair. They thought
that she might have come to the time of her death.

The man was still looking at her, changed now insensibly to a
culprit air, pathetically ridiculous.

Staring at him, the woman began to laugh, weakly, uncontrollably,
laughing hysterically and exhaustingly.

"What a--what a fright! You gave me!" She gasped. "Oh, Frank!"

Mr Lethen straightened and walked to his wife's chair.

How the other two got away from the veranda, and whether they did
so without Ada's parents hearing, they never knew. But they were far
down the windy road before Richard Milne could say: